ZIP is reimagining its platform with Generative AI and Agentic systems at its core, enabling autonomous, adaptive capabilities across its products and operations. The company is looking for a Senior Software Engineer for Generative and Agentic AI to be a foundational member of the in-house innovation group and build from the ground up in a greenfield environment.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years of focused, hands-on work with Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, and generative AI systems.
- Demonstrated success designing, developing, and deploying production-grade AI/ML systems, including large-scale inference, context management, and continuous learning.
- Deep expertise in backend systems and distributed architecture; Python required; additional fluency in languages such as C, C++, Go, or Rust are a plus.
- Extensive experience with agentic frameworks, memory/contextual planning systems, and orchestration of long-running, stateful agents
- Strong command of cloud-native development, microservices, and MLOps pipelines (e.g., with Azure, GCP, AWS).
- Applied experience integrating RLHF, embedding models, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and vector databases into modern applications.
Responsibilities
- Design and build intelligent, autonomous systems that directly enhance the customer experience, enabling AI-powered interactions, personalized repayment journeys, intelligent support agents, and the foundation for a new generation of AI-first products in a dynamic, regulated fintech environment.
- Prototype quickly, scale deliberately, evaluating emerging frameworks and models, running experiments, and hardening the most promising approaches for production deployment in real-world financial systems.
- Collaborate across engineering, product, design, compliance, and applied research to identify high-impact use cases and deliver intelligent systems that are resilient, secure, and deeply aligned with user needs.
- Build the AI foundation, selecting and integrating the right mix of LLMs, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, memory strategies, and tooling to give our agentic systems both intelligence and structure.
- Champion and evangelize AI-powered engineering, help establish and uphold best practices across performance, observability, scalability, and responsible AI, ensuring that everything we build operates with trust, regulatory compliance, and enterprise-grade reliability at scale.
- Build fast and learn faster, operating with urgency, deploying frequently, and using real feedback from customers and stakeholders to iterate and improve continuously.
- Stay at the frontier of agentic AI, tracking new developments across academia and industry, and selectively introducing promising techniques that align with our mission to deliver intelligent, adaptive, and customer-centric fintech experiences.
Other
- Systems thinker with a proven ability to design and deliver Agentic AI-native systems that scale across ambiguity, evolving data, and dynamic user needs
- Track record of translating frontier ideas like autonomous agents and adaptive workflows into resilient production systems that drive measurable product value
- Remote-first opportunity for US-based employees with the option to work in-person out of our NYC office
- Strong collaborator across product, design, data science, and security; experience in regulated domains (e.g., fintech, healthcare) is a plus.
- High emotional intelligence and low-ego; comfortable driving alignment in ambiguous and high-stakes environments.
