Senior AI Engineer - Model Selection and Orchestration
Zip Co Limited2 months ago
Base Salary
$162k - $205k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and implement intelligent decision and routing systems that select deterministic logic, retrieval, models, tools, or human escalation.
- Develop intent classification and clarification flows that identify ambiguity, evaluate confidence, and determine when more information is needed.
- Benchmark and select models and system approaches using task success, quality, latency, safety, reliability, and inference cost.
- Build reliable model orchestration with adapters, structured outputs, timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and observable failure handling.
- Integrate models, APIs, and tools with authentication, authorization, policy checks, customer confirmation, idempotency, and recovery behavior.
- Implement secure AI protections including sensitive-data handling, prompt-injection defenses, and controlled access.
- Create reusable orchestration patterns, routing components, model adapters, and tooling for AI-powered experiences.
- Test, monitor, investigate, and continuously improve AI systems using evaluation and production evidence.
- Use AI-assisted development tools to build, debug, test, and maintain software while evaluating generated solutions for correctness, security, performance, and maintainability.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree with 10 years of related experience, master’s degree with 6 years of experience, PhD with 3 years of experience, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years of professional experience building, testing, deploying, and operating production software, including production AI or ML-enabled applications.
- Strong experience with Python or TypeScript, API design, automated testing, distributed services, and debugging across application, model, and tool boundaries.
- Practical experience with LLM tool calling, structured outputs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agent or workflow orchestration.
- Experience evaluating classification quality, uncertainty, fallback strategies, model approaches, task success, latency, reliability, and inference cost.
- Experience with cloud deployment, automated testing, observability, identity and access controls, secrets management, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
- Ability to determine when to use deterministic software, retrieval, models, or combined approaches, and when agents should request clarification or escalate.
- Ability to independently deliver complex technical work, collaborate with senior engineering and cross-functional teams, communicate tradeoffs, conduct code reviews, and improve engineering practices.
- Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools in daily engineering workflows.
- Preferred experience includes Google Cloud, Google ADK, Model Garden, managed AI platforms, semantic routing, open-weight models, Model Context Protocol, reusable agent-development frameworks, Azure integrations, and payments or fintech environments.
Benefits
- Remote-first work arrangement for US-based employees with an option to work in person from the Manhattan office.
- Flexible working culture and incentive programs.
- Unlimited PTO, generous paid parental leave, and family support policies.
- Company-sponsored 401k match.
- Learning and wellness subscription stipend.
- Union Square office with a casual dress code.
- Employer-sponsored insurance with several fully Zip-covered choices for employees and dependents.
- Potential bonus and equity awards in addition to base salary and benefits.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Zip Co Limited
Zip Co Limited (ASX: ZIP) provides buy now, pay later and point-of-sale credit products for consumers, integrated into online and in-store checkouts. It earns primarily from merchant fees, interchange, and consumer charges on longer-term credit; products include Zip Pay and Zip Money. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Sydney, it operates in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States with a broad merchant acceptance network.