Software Engineer
Distinguished Scientist leading AI research at Zillow’s Agentic AI team, driving advanced machine learning, deep learning, and NLP models to build proactive, always‑on assistants that guide users through real‑estate transactions, leveraging Python, reinforcement learning, and AWS infrastructure.
About the team
About the role
In this role, you will define and drive the technical vision for long-horizon, supervised agentic systems at Zillow . You will design agent architectures, memory and supervision frameworks, and learning strategies that allow our agents to build and maintain context-rich relationships over weeks and months, not just single sessions, while remaining trustworthy, compliant, and measurably helpful. You will leverage Zillow ’s uniquely rich domain datasets—such as interaction logs, behavioral signals, and structured real-estate and transaction data—to train and adapt agents that make high-quality, human-caliber recommendations at scale.
As a Distinguished Scientist, you will:
Own the end-to-end research and technical strategy for long-horizon agentic experiences across shopping, financing, and professional workflows, in close partnership with the Agentic AI, data platform, and product teams.
Design and advance LLM post-training and evaluation methods (e.g., SFT, preference learning, RLHF/RLAIF, long-context modeling) tailored to supervised, high-stakes journeys in a complex, regulated domain.
Architect systems that combine persistent memory, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration to deliver consistent, context-rich guidance over long timelines.
Translate Zillow ’s heterogeneous data (text, voice, behavioral, and structured real-estate/transaction data) into agent-ready knowledge and signals, in partnership with data and platform teams.
Collaborate with product and design to define success metrics, evaluation frameworks, and experiment plans for agentic experiences, including human-in-the-loop supervision and safety reviews.
Operate as a senior IC with the option to lead a small pod (up to ~5 scientists/engineers) focused on long-horizon agentic systems, mentoring principal-level talent and setting a high technical bar.
Represent Zillow ’s work externally through publications, talks, open-source contributions, and thoughtful engagement with the research community, helping position Zillow as a destination for top agentic AI talent.
This is a highly visible role with broad impact across AI & Experiences. You will partner closely with senior leaders to align foundational research, platform investments, and product roadmaps around a coherent vision for Zillow as an AI-native company.
Who you are
You are a recognized leader in agentic and generative AI who is excited to tackle long-horizon, high-judgment problems in a complex, real-world domain.
You have:
A PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field—or equivalent experience—with emphasis in areas such as foundational LLMs, agentic AI, reinforcement learning, AI planning, or natural language processing.
10+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying large-scale AI
Posted June 20, 2026