Senior Applied Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Zapier
£118.1-177.1k
US Salary: $206.6K – $309.8K; Canada Salary: CA$206.6K – CA$309.8K; Spain Salary: €134.5K – €201.7K. Offers Bonus & Equity
Workflow automation service
Open for applications
Workflow automation service
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
£118.1-177.1k
US Salary: $206.6K – $309.8K; Canada Salary: CA$206.6K – CA$309.8K; Spain Salary: €134.5K – €201.7K. Offers Bonus & Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!
Role
Who you are
- If you’re passionate about large language models (LLMs), love building powerful developer tools, and want to help bring intelligent automation to millions of users, we’d love to meet you!
- You have 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 of those years dedicated to building distributed, scalable cloud based web applications. You possess strong communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and a drive to deliver outstanding customer experiences for both external users and internal stakeholders
- You have at least 1 year of experience working with large language models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks in production environments. You experimented with build user facing leveraging agent architectures
- You’re familiar with underlying technologies like transformer networks, attention mechanisms, and how they contribute to models’ abilities to generate coherent responses, generate function calls, and perform other language tasks
- You have likely deployed evaluation frameworks for LLMs, with an understanding on performance, reliability, and bias assessment
- You likely have experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and understand how to optimize knowledge retrieval for improved model accuracy and speed. You likely have experience with different indexing and chunking strategies based on the system’s data and goals, as well as semantic search and vector databases, and how they differ from traditional retrieval methods and databases
- You have experience of working through the full lifecycle of building, testing, deploying, and scaling LLM architectures
- You can identify and document trade-offs made during the development process. You also have experience building with cloud infrastructure technologies
- You love shipping to customers. You’ll be on a team focused on understanding customers' needs and translating those needs from specifications into functional, production-ready code. You know how to balance speed versus quality to support the features we build for our
- You embody our values. At Zapier, our values are at the heart of how we work together and how we think about our customers. In our remote setting, they help develop trust and ensure we work and collaborate to democratize automation
What the job involves
- Are you excited about building the AI foundation that powers real product experiences? We’re thrilled to invite you to join the Data AI/ML team at Zapier as a Sr. Applied AI Engineer!
- As a key member of our team, you’ll be at the heart of our efforts to make AI a core part of every Zapier product. You’ll help design and build the reusable building blocks—like LLM-powered APIs, vector search services, orchestration libraries, and evaluation tooling—that enable teams across the company to create AI agent experiences quickly and safely
- This is your chance to shape how AI is implemented at Zapier—from the raw data and infrastructure to the user-facing product experiences. You’ll collaborate with AI Engineers, Product teams and Machine Learning Engineers to make sure our AI capabilities are scalable, reliable, and easy to use. Your work will have massive impact across the entire organization
- Build foundational AI tooling—like reusable frontend and backend components for AI agent experiences, observability mechanisms and evaluation tooling
- You will work mostly in TypeScript. Experience isn’t strictly required, but it is a big plus. Comfort with typed languages and modern backend practices is a must
- Design and implement data-driven feedback loops to monitor and improve the performance, reliability, and safety of agent systems at scale
- Proactively identify tooling gaps and work across teams to standardize best practices for building, deploying, and monitoring AI-driven experiences
- Collaborate closely with engineers across product, infra, and data teams to ensure our AI components are reusable, well-documented, and easy to adopt company-wide
- Experiment with emerging LLMs and retrieval strategies, helping the team evaluate when to fine-tune, swap models, or adjust orchestration logic
- Difference between an Applied AI Engineer and an ML Engineer at Zapier:
- How do we discern between other AI-forward engineering roles like ML Engineers and Applied AI Engineers? Both roles benefit from backend engineering skills and experience with LLMs
- ML engineers are expected to have more experience building data pipelines as well as experience utilizing other types of ML models beyond LLMs
- AI engineers are expected to have more full stack engineering experience, which would typically include frontend experience, and may only have experience working with LLMs
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: July 18, 2025 at 4:00 AM UTC
- All we ask is that you answer a few in-depth questions in our application that would typically be asked at the start of an interview process. This helps speed things up by letting us get to know you and your skillset a bit better right out of the gate. Please be sure to answer each question; the resume and CV fields are optional
- Education is not a requirement for our roles; however, if you receive an offer, you will need to include your most recent educational experience as part of our background check process
- After you apply, you are going to hear back from us—even if we don’t see an immediate fit with our team. In fact, throughout the process, we strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application. We know we’ll make mistakes from time to time, so if you ever have questions about where you stand or about the process, just ask your recruiter!
Our take
Even before remote working became the "in thing", freelancers, small business owners, and large organisations have found themselves needing more and more software platforms to serve their operational needs. As people used more software services, Zapier founders saw the need to connect the actions between these software and save everyone some time.
Zapier is the largest integration and automation tool for businesses. Since its founding, Zapier has grown its suite of automation offerings across almost every mainstream software service. The company is one of the most successful to come out of Y Combinator and has also been a pioneer of remote working.
Zapier has so far been able to capitalise heavily on its advantage as one of the first entrants and has had very little actual competition. Software services aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and organisations are only going to need more of them. This puts Zapier in a strong position for growth, but also opens up room for bolder companies to get in on the action. Companies like Airtable and Integromat are already preying on more niche segments of Zapier's market share.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
38% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Oct 2012
$1.3m
SEED
Sep 2012
$0.2m
SEED
Total funding: $1.5m
Company benefits
- Work from anywhere
- Bonus program
- Unlimited vacation policy
- Great healthcare + dental + vision coverage*
- Retirement plan with company match*
- Stock options for every Zapien**
- 2 annual company retreats to awesome places
- 14 weeks paid leave for new parents
- Home office setup stipend
- Professional development allowance
Additional info
- As a fully remote company with 800+ team members across 40+ states, 38 countries, and 18+ timezones, we’ve adopted a culture of asynchronous work. This work style allows teams to collaborate effectively across locations, time zones, skills, and each individual’s energy levels, and empowers employees to work in a setting that fits their needs. In practice, we live on Slack, with most conversations in public channels. It mimics the open-office feel and allows everyone to search the chat logs if they need to find something that happened when they weren’t around
Leadership
Wade Foster
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding Zapier, wasEmail Marketing Manager with Veterans United Home Loans, and Customer Development Lead at The Idea Works.
Bryan Helmig
(Co-Founder & CTO)Was previously Product Dev/Manager at Veterans United Home Loans.
Mike Knoop
(Co-Founder)Was CPO and Head of Labs at Zapier before becoming President. Previously was a Graduate Research at the University of Missouri.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 20 more jobs at Zapier