Principal Applied Scientist, Generative AI

The Agentic Foundations team is a focused group of 15-20 applied scientists within Zillow's broader Agentic AI organization, building the foundational AI technologies that power the next generation of home shopping experiences. We work as a flat team where scientists own their areas and set direction, partnering closely with product, engineering, platform, and data teams to translate the latest advances in LLMs, reinforcement learning, and post-training into production impact. This is an exciting time to join as Zillow is building agentic skills across the full home-shopping journey - from search and personalized guidance to offer strategy and financing - at a scale of hundreds of millions of requests per day.

About the role

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will set the scientific direction for the large language models behind Zillow's AI assistant and lead the scientists who build them. You will get to:

• Define the research agenda for LLM post-training, reward modeling, and evaluation of our agentic systems
• Lead and grow a group of applied scientists, providing technical direction, mentorship, and a high bar for scientific rigor
• Drive ambiguous, high-impact problems end to end, from a product vision to the experiments, models, and data needed to get there
• Translate state-of-the-art research in generative AI into practical improvements in a product used by millions of home shoppers
• Communicate scientific strategy and results to executives and cross-functional partners

This role has been categorized as a Remote position. "Remote" employees do not have a permanent corporate office workplace and, instead, work from a physical location of their choice, which must be identified to the Company. U.S. employees may live in any of the 50 United States, with limited exceptions.

In California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $195,600.00 - $312,400.00 annually. This base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia the standard base pay range for this role is $185,800.00 - $296,800.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.

In addition to a competitive base salary this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location. Employees in this role will not be paid below the salary threshold for exempt employees in the state where they reside.

Who you are

Must-haves

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or a master's degree with equivalent research experience
• Deep, hands-on expertise in large language models or foundation models, including post-training (SFT, DPO, RLHF, RFT/GRPO), reward modeling, or LLM evaluation
• A track record of leading others: either managing teams of scientists or engineers while staying technically hands-on, or leading a research group with a strong publication record
• Ability to independently scope and solve ambiguous problems and influence technical direction across teams
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch, with the ability to read, debug, and guide experimental code

• Publications at top venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, or EMNLP
• Experience applying LLMs in consumer-facing products at scale
• Experience with agentic AI systems and their evaluation
• Background in reinforcement learning or preference learning