Senior Applied Scientist

About the team Zillow’s AI organization builds the intelligence that powers Zillow’s mission to make home a reality for more people - across buying, selling, renting, and financing. The Partner Communications AI team is at the forefront of this mission, transforming how real estate agents, loan officers, and customers connect. We go beyond simple conversational interfaces to build integrated, intelligent communication ecosystems. Using modern NLP and Generative AI, we personalize high-stakes messaging, automate communication workflows, and surface real-time insights across multi-channel communication streams and diverse data. We operate at the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI, classical ML, and complex multi‑channel data, collaborating deeply with product, engineering, analytics, operations, and compliance to ensure our AI solutions are innovative, trustworthy, unbiased, and measurable. About the role As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will be a hands-on technical leader and innovator for our partner communications AI systems. You will design novel models, reasoning systems, and evaluation frameworks that facilitate and enhance how real estate professionals and customers connect and interact. Your work will power a wide range of communication experiences - from context-aware personalized message creation to the next generation of intelligent agentic AI assistants that streamline professional workflows. You will own the science lifecycle end‑to‑end: breaking down ambiguous problems, exploring messy multi‑channel and CRM data, training and fine‑tuning models, and defining how we measure success, quality, safety, and impact for GenAI at Zillow. You Will Get To: Drive the science of communication intelligence. Own the modeling strategy for intelligent tools that enhance partner workflows, including messaging, summarization, and workflow automation. You’ll find innovative ways to combine lightweight models with agentic systems to enable real estate professionals to scale and deepen their relationships without losing their personal touch. Drive R&D and innovation. Conduct applied research to design novel architectures and reasoning systems. You’ll stay at the forefront of the field, bringing cutting-edge approaches into the organization and contributing to the broader AI community where appropriate. Define evaluation and safety for GenAI. Design robust offline and online evaluation, including experiments, hallucination/error detection, and guardrails so systems are helpful, honest, and aligned with business and policy constraints. Master messy, multi‑channel data. Work with large, messy real‑world data (call transcripts, SMS, email, CRM events, funnel behavior, and more) using big data tools (e.g., Databricks, SQL, Spark) to explore, transform, and productionalize features. Mentor and lead through Influence. Partner with product and engineering to turn research into business impact, while mentoring scientists, engineers, and PhD interns. You will elevate the scientific craft of the broader organization, with opportunities to drive novel research and external publications. 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, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $160,900.00 - $257,100.00 annually. This base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations. In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont the standard base pay range for this role is $152,900.00 - $244,300.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations. ... (truncated, view full listing at source)