Staff Engineer, Applied AI

We're humans who simply think computers should do more work.

At Zapier, we’re not just making software—we’re building a platform to help millions of businesses globally scale with automation and AI. Our mission is to make automation work for everyone by delivering products that delight our customers. You’ll collaborate with brilliant people, use the latest tools, and leverage the flexibility of remote work. Your work will directly fuel our customers’ success, and as they grow, so will you.

Job posted: September 12, 2025

Location: Americas (North, Central and South America)

Zapier is hiring a Staff Applied AI Engineer for our Agents team to make agentic automation actually useful at scale. You’ll shape how our Agents plan, reason, remember, and safely take action through 8,000+ integrations—with enterprise-grade reliability. This isn’t a labs playground. Agents is customer-facing and revenue-impacting. If you like shipping systems that thousands of teams rely on—not just demos—you’ll thrive here.

Agents @ Zapier: One of our most ambitious bets—an AI assistant that helps users get work done across thousands of apps, at your finger tips, or as you sleep, and all of it easy enough to build in the space between one meeting and the next. You’ll work on reasoning, integrations, and the interface that lets users delegate with natural language. We move fast, but we harden what we ship.

Why this is different (and exciting)

• Actions are solved here: Everyone’s building agents; few can make them do things while you sleep. Zapier’s native connection to 8,000+ apps gives your agent real superpowers on day one.

• Immediate impact & distribution: Ship improvements that land in real customer environments quickly—across SMB to enterprise—then iterate with telemetry, not vibes.

• Hard problems, not hype: Planning & tool selection, grounding & evals, safety & governance, memory models, latency/cost tradeoffs—at production scale.

• Autonomy with responsibility: Your decisions shape product strategy, not just implementation details.

• Pragmatic AI culture: We explore new things as they develop and push the boundaries of agentic ability and UX, but we know when to lock down, standardize, and scale. Reliability > novelty when customers depend on it.

If you’re interested in advancing your career at a fast-growing, profitable, impact-driven company, then read on…

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

• Proven engineering impact: You’ve driven outcomes in complex, cloud-based systems used by real customers. Bonus: you’ve helped win or expand enterprise deals—leading POCs, navigating security/compliance reviews, or shaping product requirements to land enterprise adoption. Many strong candidates for our Staff+ role have 10+ years’ experience. We hire for impact and capability, not years.

• LLM expertise: You have at least 2 years or equivalent depth of hands-on work with large language models in production, including user-facing products leveraging agent architectures. You are familiar with transformer networks, attention mechanisms, and their role in generating responses, function calls, and other complex tasks.

• Evaluation & retrieval systems: You have direct experience deploying evaluation frameworks for LLMs (performance, reliability, bias) and building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. You have nuanced perspectives and experience with indexing/chunking strategies, semantic search, and vector databases, and how they differ from traditional retrieval methods.

• Builder first: You lead through hands-on contribution—pairing with product teams, unblocking adoption, modeling best practices, and shipping. You execute, not just advise.

• Pragmatic judgment over novelty: You separate signal from hype. You’re comfortable saying “not ready for production” (and explaining why), and you partner with product to decide when to keep exploring vs. when to lock down, standardize, and scale—using results from evals, user impact, and clear cost/latency tradeoffs.

• You design for scale and ambiguity. You can design systems and solutions in complex, high-scale environments—where priorities are fluid and ambiguity is the norm.

• Skilled communicator: You’re known for moving fluidly between pair programming, cross functional problem-solving, and customer discovery. You evaluate long vs. short-term solutions through the lens of speed to impact and cohesion of customer experience. You form trusting relationships and know how to bring others with you.

• You are an AI power user. You proactively embrace AI as a core part of your engineering toolkit and are excited to explore new ways it can accelerate learning, development, and operations. You don’t just use AI—you advocate for it, sharing your workflows and helping others level up.

• Make Zapier Agents the #1 way to get real work done with AI: A year from now, Agents is the obvious choice—and you’ve delivered features, spotted differentiation opportunities, advised on product strategy, and up-leveled how our teams and customers build with Agents.

• Shape AI & Agents strategy: Stay close to the AI ecosystem, filter hype, and bring the right insights in-house for targeted experiments with crisp success criteria. You’ll scout high-leverage opportunities, define how planning and tool integrations show up in the user experience, and set clear explore-vs-harden guardrails—including making the call when something isn’t production-ready.

• Drive technical oversight: You’ll provide oversight for agent initiatives within and adjacent to Agents, ensuring we scale responsibly (security, privacy, reliability) while keeping velocity high. You’ll help Zapier adapt to a growing surface area without losing coherence.

• Advance agent architecture & developer experience: You’ll bring deep AI expertise to the Staff Engineer group, collaborate with Principal Engineers on company-level direction.

• Build data-driven systems: You’ll design feedback loops and evaluation suites that capture real usage, synthesize core use cases, and improve grounding, tool-use success, prompting strategies, and model choice—balancing quality, latency, and cost.

• Integrate and innovate (pragmatically): You’ll explore emerging agent capabilities and the ecosystem around them, then make crisp go/no-go calls and turn the right bets into durable product and platform wins.

• Collaborate and teach: You’ll mentor engineers, codify practical agent patterns, and help teams and customers understand where Agents fits in their broader AI transformation—multiplying impact beyond your immediate team.

At Zapier, we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us better, which is why we have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. We're looking for the best fit for each of our roles, regardless of the type of companies in your background, so we encourage you to apply even if your skills and experiences don’t exactly match the job description. 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!

Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and we're excited to work with talented and empathetic people of all identities. Zapier does not discriminate based on someone's identity in any aspect of hiring or employment as required by law and in line with our commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be, and we celebrate our differences because those differences are what allow us to make a product that serves a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.

Zapier prioritizes the security of our customers' information and is dedicated to adhering to all applicable data privacy laws. You can review our privacy policy here.

Zapier is committed to inclusion. As part of this commitment, Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact [email protected].

Compensation Range: $274.8K - $412.2K