Staff Engineer, Applied AI

📋 Description

• • Own the architecture and evolution of Zapier Agents, the customer-facing AI assistant that executes real work across 8,000+ integrations while users sleep. You will turn cutting-edge research into production-grade systems that thousands of teams trust every day.
• • Drive technical strategy for agentic automation at Zapier. You will decide which emerging capabilities (planning, memory, tool-use, safety) graduate from experiment to core product, balancing innovation with enterprise-grade reliability, security, and cost.
• • Design and ship evaluation frameworks that continuously measure agent performance, hallucination rates, latency, and cost per task. Your dashboards will guide product, engineering, and executive decisions on model choice, prompting strategies, and rollout velocity.
• • Harden the integration layer that lets Agents call SaaS APIs safely and repeatably. You will define retry, idempotency, rate-limiting, and governance patterns that work across SMBs and Fortune 500 customers with strict compliance requirements.
• • Lead cross-functional squads of backend, frontend, data, and product partners. You will unblock adoption, model best practices, and ship end-to-end features—from natural-language intent parsing to secure credential storage—in weeks, not quarters.
• • Mentor senior and staff engineers across Zapier on pragmatic AI engineering. You will create internal playbooks, brown-bag sessions, and reusable libraries that multiply the impact of every team building with Agents.
• • Partner directly with enterprise prospects and customers to understand high-stakes use cases, run technical proof-of-concepts, and translate security, privacy, and governance needs into roadmap priorities and architecture requirements.
• • Establish feedback loops that turn real-world usage into product insight. You will instrument telemetry, run A/B tests, and synthesize qualitative feedback to refine planning algorithms, retrieval strategies, and UX patterns.
• • Contribute to Zapier’s overall technical direction by collaborating with Principal Engineers and the CTO office. Your research spikes and architecture RFCs will influence how the entire company adopts AI over the next five years.
• • Champion a culture of responsible AI. You will define guardrails for data retention, PII redaction, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop overrides, ensuring Agents remain trustworthy as capabilities and surface area expand.