Senior Applied Scientist

About the teamThe Zillow Group’s Search & Conversational AI team helps millions of people search and find the home of their dreams. This team uses AI to help customers express their search queries in natural language and easily navigate to the results to find homes of their dreams. This team drives innovation by providing an engaging, personalized search experience to our customers using ML models and data updated in near real-time. This is a lean, customer-focused team comprising scientists and engineers, working together to deliver a delightful customer experience. We strongly believe in accountability, collaboration, and transparency. The team is also building scalable solutions for a state-of-the-art context-aware conversational AI system to help customers navigate their complex real estate journey.
Recently, this team launched Natural Language Search, a first in the real estate industry to transform the way users search for their home. This goes beyond standard filter-based search to enable users to search using queries like “waterfront homes in seattle”. The team is in the process of launching the first consumer facing conversational assistant for consumers of Zillow.

About the role

Zillow is looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to join the Search & Conversational AI team. This is a high-impact position that shapes the future of search in the real-estate domain by influencing multiple Zillow Group brands, including Zillow, Trulia and StreetEasy. They will be hands-on in prototyping ideas, conducting analyses, and evaluating and deploying models to Zillow's highly scalable infrastructure platforms. 

Zillow powers hundreds of millions of searches daily that are personalized for its customers. They will deliver project through various stages of development lifecycle, such as data analysis, hypothesis framing, algorithm development, offline validation, AB testing, and in-production support. 

As an Applied Scientist in the Search team, you will: 

• Leverage customer data to construct ranking models that deliver a personalized search & conversational experience

• Use vector embeddings search and information retrieval techniques to find relevant data

• Create an immersive user experience by utilizing language models to comprehend and guide customer queries

• Scale systems to handle 1 billion searches per day and be highly performant

• Build task-oriented conversational experiences using retrieval augment generation (RAG) over LLMs

• Manage cost vs performance tradeoffs and make the systems operationally efficient

• Mentor other scientists and engineers to architect using the right models and tools

• Share your knowledge and effectively communicate your ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Be the focal point for science projects, coordinating deliverables, writing papers, modeling, authoring designs, and creating science plans

• Keep up with the latest advancements in LLMs, Personalized Ranking/Recommender systems, Conversational AI systems to iterate, experiment, and bring the right toolkits

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, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $158,200.00 - $252,800.00 Annually. This base pay range is specific to California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC 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.

Who you are

As an Applied Scientist, you are a roll-up-the-sleeves and get-it-done researcher in machine learning with an understanding of natural language processing fundamentals. We are looking for someone who has:

• A Ph.D. or another advanced degree in Computer Science with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building ML/AI systems for search, ranking, or recommender system

• Fluency in building fine-tuned language models for solving domain-specific problems

• Expertise in machine learning tools and packages like Python, Numpy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, SciPy, PyTorch, Tensorflow, etc.

• Knowledge in state-of-the-art methods but has experience developing unique and original models to solve complex problems

• Knowledge about applied research for using LLMs as agents

• Familiarity with different Transformer based architectures and their applications

• Experience in conversational AI building dialog systems for question-answering, or other business functions, is nice to have

• Experience deploying highly scalable, business-critical ML models in production

• Been keeping up with industry trends, recent advancements, and best practices 

• Prior experience with responsible AI development, tuning models for ethical / fairness considerations is nice to have

Get to know us

Zillow is reimagining real estate to make home a reality for more and more people.

As the most-visited real estate website in the United States, Zillow® and its affiliates help movers find and win their home through digital solutions, first class partners, and easier buying, selling, financing and renting experiences. Millions of people visit Zillow Group sites every month to start their home search, and now they can rely on Zillow to help make it easier to move. The work we do helps people get home and no matter what job you're in, you will play a critical role in making home a reality for more and more people.

Our efforts to streamline the real estate transaction are supported by a deep-rooted culture of innovation, our passion to redefine the employee experience, a fundamental commitment to Equity and Belonging, and world-class benefits. These benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverages as well as parental leave, family benefits, retirement contributions, and paid time off. We’re also setting the standard for work experiences of the future, where our employees are supported in doing their best work and living a flexible, well-balanced life. But don’t just take our word for it. Read recent reviews on Glassdoor and recent recognition from multiple organizations, including: the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award, Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Corporate Equity Index, and TIME 100 Most Influential Companies list.

Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact your recruiter directly.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable state and local law.

Applicants who receive job offers from Zillow Group will be asked to sign a Proprietary Rights Agreement which includes confidentiality, intellectual property assignment, customer and employee non-solicitation, and non-competition provisions. If you are contacted for a role at Zillow Group and wish to review a copy of the Proprietary Rights Agreement prior to receiving an offer, you may request a copy from your Recruiter.