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About The Team
The Agentic AI team at Zillow is at the forefront of transforming the real estate industry by helping millions of people use AI technologies to move into their next home. Our mission is to redefine the home shopping and transaction experience through an always-on assistant that integrates deep panoptic understanding, domain expertise, and sophisticated reasoning. This lean, cross-functional team of applied scientists and engineers is committed to delivering innovative solutions through collaboration, accountability, and transparency.
Within Agentic AI, the Applied Reasoning team focuses on building the LLM reasoning and orchestration capabilities that power Zillow’s AI Copilot. Our goal is to enable the Copilot to think and act like the best-performing real estate professionals. Our work includes
Fine-tuning LLMs to support long-term goal-oriented customer journeys—from home search to mortgage approval
Infusing AI agents with high EQ by learning from top real-estate professionals, delivering emotionally intelligent support across all touchpoints
Developing orchestration frameworks that allow AI agents to autonomously fulfill personalized tasks and respond contextually throughout the user journey
About The Role
Zillow is looking for a Senior Applied Scientist on the Applied Reasoning team within the Agentic AI organization to research and develop advanced LLM Reasoning Engine specialized in the real estate domain. In this role, you'll take a hands-on approach to prototyping, evaluating, and deploying reasoning models and AI Agent applications on Zillow’s scalable infrastructure. Your work will involve developing capabilities in language understanding, deep reasoning, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning to adapt the decision-making of AI Agents to the real-estate domain.
As a Senior Applied Scientist in the Agentic AI team, you will:
Design, prototype, and build advanced agentic systems capable of highly autonomous, context-aware, and adaptive interactions across diverse real estate use cases
Apply reinforcement learning and fine-tuning techniques to develop agents that can reason, collaborate, compete, or negotiate in dynamic, goal-driven environments to fulfill user needs.
Define and refine evaluation and experimentation processes for LLM-driven applications using offline metrics, human-in-the-loop assessments, and A/B testing to balance rapid innovation with reliability and responsible deployment
Stay at the forefront of agentic AI research and innovation, bringing emerging techniques into practical application to shape product direction.
Contribute to the broader scientific community through publications, conference presentations, and internal knowledge sharing
Mentor and guide junior scientists and engineers, promoting best practices in applied research, scalable agentic architecture, and responsible AI development.
Who You Are
As a Senior Applied Scientist, you are a hands-on researcher who combines scientific rigor with practical engineering to deliver real-world impact at scale. You thrive in solving complex problems and turning advanced research into robust, production-ready solutions. We are looking for someone who has:
A Ph.D. or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related field, with a focus on reinforcement learning, AI planning, or natural language processing
4+ years of experience in building large-scale, high-impact ML solutions, particularly in areas such as NLP, agent-based systems, or multi-agent collaboration or similar paradigms
Experience in developing and working with LLM reasoning models or AI agents capable of multi-step reasoning and context-rich decision-making
Experience with reinforcement learning and LLM fine-tuning
Track record of publishing high-impact research in top AI/ML venues
hackajob is partnering with Zillow to fill this position. Create a profile to be automatically considered for this role—and others that match your experience.