Senior AI Engineer - Model Selection and Orchestration

The posting, as Zip Co Limited wrote it

• Senior AI Engineer with experience building production AI systems, model orchestration, tool calling, retrieval, and modern software engineering practices to build reliable AI capabilities across customer-facing and internal experiences.
• Hands-on engineer who owns components of the decision and orchestration layer that determines when agents should use a model, tool, retrieval system, or deterministic workflow, balancing quality, safety, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Remote-first opportunity for US-based employees with the option to work in-person out of our Manhattan office.

Start your adventure with Zip

Become a part of Zip's Engineering team and take on exciting challenges at the intersection of AI, software engineering, and financial technology. At Zip, our engineers build systems that move real money and serve millions of customers, making reliability, security, and sound engineering judgment fundamental to how we build.

We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer to help turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into dependable customer experiences and useful tools for our teams. You’ll work within our AI Platforms team, building shared capabilities that support Zia, our customer-facing AI experience, as well as internal agents and AI-powered workflows across Zip.

You’ll play a hands-on role in designing and building the decision and orchestration layer that helps agents interpret requests and determine the right execution approach. Depending on the task, that could mean deterministic logic, retrieval, a lightweight classifier, an AI model, a tool call, or a more complex reasoning workflow. You’ll use evidence about task quality, safety, latency, reliability, and cost to recommend and implement those decisions.

This is a builder’s role where you’ll write production code, evaluate AI system behavior, integrate models and tools, contribute to technical decisions, and work closely with Principal and Staff Engineers, Product, domain engineering, Security, and Risk. You’ll use managed capabilities within the Gemini Enterprise Agentic Platform (GEAP) and approved cloud tooling, while building Zip-specific orchestration, decision logic, and integrations where needed.

Interesting problems you will get to solve

• Build Intelligent Decision and Routing Systems: Design and implement the decision layer that determines how an agent should respond to a task, including when to use deterministic logic, retrieval, smaller models, reasoning models, tools, or human escalation.
• Build Intent and Clarification Flows: Develop intent classification and clarification capabilities that distinguish information requests from actions, identify ambiguous requests, evaluate confidence, and determine when additional information or escalation is required.
• Evaluate and Select Models: Benchmark rules, retrieval approaches, classifiers, smaller models, and reasoning models against representative tasks. Use measurable outcomes such as task success, quality, lat

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choices available

The annual base Pay Range for this position is $162,000 - $205,000 . This range reflects our US national compensation (USN). Additional premium percentages may apply based on our tiered premium strategy.

Subject to those same considerations, the total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including a bonus and/or equity awards, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.

If hired, employees will be in an 'at-will position' and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation or benefit program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

Be a part of a team that reflects the diversity of our customers

We pride ourselves on being a workplace that provides equal opportunities to people of all ages, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, veteran status, and everything else that makes you unique.

Equally, we’re committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are accessible and inclusive. Please let us know if there are any adjustments that need to be made to ensure you have a fair and equitable experience.

And finally…get to know us

Zip is a global ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ company that gives our millions of customers simpler and fairer ways to pay.

We are proud to be a global business built around our US and ANZ core markets working with merchant partners including Amazon, Best Buy, eBay and Uber. United by our mission, purpose and values - Customer First, Own It, Stronger Together & Change The Game - we are the next generation of payments, helping people across the globe to fearlessly take control of their financial future.

We are Zip, and we are just getting started.

Before you apply, give Zip a try -> rebrand.ly/check-zip-out

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