Remote-First Senior AI Orchestration Engineer

Zip Co; United States; Remote; USD 162,000 - 205,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working culture

Unlimited PTO

401k match

Wellness stipend

Zip office accessibility

Job summary

Zip is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into dependable customer experiences and useful tools for internal teams. You will work in the AI Platforms team, building shared capabilities that support Zia and internal agents across Zip.

You’ll design the decision and orchestration layer that determines when to use deterministic logic, retrieval, a model, a tool call, or escalation, balancing quality, safety, latency, reliability, and cost.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 3 years experience; or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years building, testing, deploying, and operating production software including AI/ML-enabled applications.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript and modern software practices (API design, testing, distributed services).
• Hands-on experience with LLM tool calling, structured outputs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agent/workflow orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the decision and orchestration layer to choose deterministic logic, retrieval, smaller models, tools, or human escalation.
• Develop intent classification and clarification flows to resolve ambiguous requests.
• Benchmark and select models based on task success, latency, and reliability metrics.
• Implement reliable model orchestration with adapters, routing, timeouts, and retries.
• Integrate models, APIs, and tools with proper authentication, authorization, and safety controls.
• Collaborate with Security and Risk on data protections, prompt-injection defenses, and access controls.
• Create reusable AI platform capabilities to aid domain engineering teams and agent builders.
• Monitor production systems, evaluate failures, and continuously improve model selection and orchestration.

Skills

AI systems

Model orchestration

Tool calling

Retrieval augmented

Production software engineering

Python/TypeScript

Model evaluation/selection

CI/CD/Observability

Security & compliance

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Master’s degree

PhD

Tools

Google Cloud

Model Garden

Azure integrations

Job description

Zip is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into dependable customer experiences and useful tools for internal teams. You will work in the AI Platforms team, building shared capabilities that support Zia and internal agents across Zip.

You’ll design the decision and orchestration layer that determines when to use deterministic logic, retrieval, a model, a tool call, or escalation, balancing quality, safety, latency, reliability, and cost.