Senior Applied Scientist (Post-Training)

The job

LIVE Live feed (private-sector employer) Source: The Muse public API · Data: listed 2026-10-21

Job description

About the team

The Agentic Foundations team is a focused group of 15-20 applied scientists within Zillow's broader Agentic AI organization, building the foundational AI technologies that power the next generation of home shopping experiences. This Senior Applied Scientist will focus on model post-training and reward modeling - the science that lets our agents measurably improve over time as part of a self-evolving agentic system. The role will drive complex, ambiguous work end-to-end, partnering closely with product, engineering, science, platform, and data teams to translate the latest advances in LLMs, reinforcement learning, and post-training into production impact. This is an exciting time to join as Zillow is building agentic skills across the full home-shopping journey - from search and personalized guidance to offer strategy and financing - at a scale of hundreds of millions of requests per day.

About the role

Role and responsibilities:

• Own LLM post-training pipelines - SFT, DPO, and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT/GRPO) - running training end-to-end on GPU infrastructure.
• Build and train fast, multi-category reward models (PRMs) that emit scalar signals from contrastive preference pairs.
• Design on-policy and online assessment: score live agent trajectories using LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks.
• Translate offline evaluation rubrics into generalizable reward functions that work on arbitrary production traces.
• Independently drive complex work end-to-end by collaborating across partner teams.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship while helping translate state-of-the-art AI research into production impact.

• Master's degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field.
• Hands-on experience with LLM post-training and RL fine-tuning: SFT, DPO, RFT/GRPO, running end-to-end training runs on GPU infrastructure.
• Exposure to reward model development - research-level experience is sufficient; production deployment is not required.
• Strong knowledge of generative AI, including foundation models, transformers, reinforcement learning, and preference learning.
• Ability to independently scope and solve ambiguous problems end-to-end while providing technical leadership to scientists and MLEs.
• Strong programming skills, especially Python, plus experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience evaluating agentic AI: multi-turn trace analysis, LLM-as-a-Judge, and the interaction between offline evals and online monitoring.
• Published work in post-training, RLHF/RLAIF, preference learning, or reward modeling.
• Experience with GPU training platforms such as Databricks or Fireworks.

Explore around this job

Field: Engineering, Construction and Energy Sub-niche: Manufacturing and hardware engineering All jobs at Zillow

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About the role

This is a Senior Level role in the Engineering, Construction and Energy field (Manufacturing and hardware engineering) at Zillow. Senior roles usually expect substantial experience, ownership of results and often the ability to guide others.

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FAQ

What is the Senior Applied Scientist (Post-Training) job at Zillow?

A senior level role in engineering, construction and energy (manufacturing and hardware engineering) listed 19 days ago. The full description is on this page and on The Muse.

Where is this job?

Remote / flexible (United States). A remote or flexible location is listed; confirm with the employer which states are accepted.

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How much does it pay?

The listing does not publish pay, and we could not match the title to one official occupation.

What is the cost of living there?

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How old is this listing?

It was posted on 2026-10-21 (19 days ago). Jobs older than 90 days are not shown.

Are there similar jobs?

Yes: browse manufacturing and hardware engineering jobs in the United States.

Sources and terms

• Job data: The Muse public API (listing dated 2026-10-21). The job disappears from this site when it disappears from the source.
• Wages and projections: BLS OEWS (May 2025) and Employment Projections 2025–35.
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Sources

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