Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI Services

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI Services to build and scale end-to-end intelligent systems that power personalized experiences and HDP-aligned capabilities. This is a hands-on IC role where you'll spend most of your time writing code and driving technical design for impactful production systems. You will operate at the intersection of scalable backend services and applied AI/ML systems. You will help turn user intent into intelligence, safely bring new AI capabilities from 0→1, and scale them across Zillow's shopper journey surfaces.

Responsibilities

Lead end-to-end delivery of features from early prototypes to production-hardened systems; Work deeply with AI/ML workflows; Design, build, and maintain data pipelines that turn raw events and signals into durable features and model inputs; Develop and integrate ML/LLM capabilities into backend flows and expose them via stable services and APIs; Design and iterate on prompts, configurations, and AI workflows; Build automated evaluation systems with clear quality metrics; Translate prototypes into reliable, observable production systems; Collaborate closely with AI/ML and Agentic AI teams

Requirements

Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, or similar; Experience delivering scalable services or APIs to production in a cloud environment; Hands-on experience with data processing or distributed systems such as Spark, Databricks, Kafka or similar; Comfortable designing and consuming APIs (REST or GraphQL); Worked with ML or LLM-based systems and shipped at least one feature to production; Familiar with embeddings, ranking, clustering, recommendations, or other ML applications; Experience with prompt engineering and LLM-based product development, including safety/guardrail considerations and offline/online evaluation frameworks; Comfortable in modern infrastructure environments such as Kubernetes-based deployments, event-driven architectures, and observability stacks; Track record of owning projects end-to-end

Benefits

Equity awards