Principal Applied Scientist, Agentic AI
About the team
The Agentic AI team at Zillow is transforming the real estate industry by helping millions of people navigate one of the most important decisions of their lives with AI-powered guidance. Our mission is to redefine the home shopping and transaction experience through an always-on assistant that combines deep real estate expertise, grounded data access, advanced reasoning, and the ability to take meaningful action on behalf of customers.
Within the Agentic AI organization, the Applied Reasoning team builds the foundation for agents that perform complex, multi-step reasoning and for proactive, long-running agents that can anticipate customer needs and complete valuable work over time. We focus on advancing agent depth, breadth, proactiveness, and reliability through rigorous experimentation, evaluation, and production innovation About the role
As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will set the science direction for advanced reasoning and long-running agent systems within the Agentic AI organization. You will partner closely with applied scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers, product leaders, and senior stakeholders to define the science roadmap for Zillow ’s agentic experiences. This is a high-impact principal individual contributor role responsible for translating emerging advances in agentic AI into reliable, differentiated customer experiences.
You will get to
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Define and drive the end-to-end applied science strategy for advanced reasoning and long-running agent systems, balancing innovation, customer value, reliability, safety, and business priorities.
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Advance agent capabilities through agent architecture and harness design, context and memory engineering, test time scaling, post-training, evaluation and data flywheel.
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Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks for agentic systems, including task- and trajectory-level evaluation, long-horizon benchmarks, controlled experiments, ablation studies, and online measurement.
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Influence senior and executive stakeholders by clearly communicating scientific insights, technical trade-offs, risks, and recommendations that shape Zillow ’s Agentic AI product and platform strategy.
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Stay at the forefront of research in agentic AI and foundation models, selectively introducing advances that materially improve Zillow ’s customer experiences.
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Represent Zillow ’s work through publications, conference presentations, open-source contributions, patents, and external technical engagement.
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 $191,300.00 - $305,700.00 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 $181,800.00 - $290,400.00 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
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You have a PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience demonstrating comparable depth of technical expertise, scientific leadership, and impact in production AI systems