Principal Applied Scientist, Agentic AI

About the team

The Agentic AI team at Zillow is at the forefront of transforming the real estate industry by helping millions of people use AI technologies to find their next home. We aim to redefine the home shopping and transaction experience by providing an always‑on, multimodal assistant that integrates deep user and home insights, along with sophisticated reasoning. By embedding domain knowledge and specialized expertise in these assistants, we empower home buyers and real estate professionals to gain efficiency while maintaining Zillow's competitive edge.

This lean, customer‑focused team comprises of scientists and engineers working together to deliver delightful customer experiences. We strongly believe in accountability, collaboration, and transparency.

Zillow is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist on the Agentic AI team to research and develop advanced, multimodal foundational technologies (CV, NLP, 3D) for next‑generation understanding of homes, both indoors and outdoors. They will be hands‑on in prototyping ideas, evaluating, and deploying models to Zillow's highly scalable infrastructure platforms.

As a Principal Applied Scientist in the Agentic AI team, you will:

• Design, prototype, and develop multi‑agent image‑forward, voice‑assisted experiences.
• Serve as the focal point for science projects, science roadmap development, driving alignment on timelines, and prioritization.
• Represent the team at conferences, publish in top‑tier journals, like CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, ACL, and SIGGRAPH, and champion internal best practices.
• Distill complex research findings and system designs into actionable insights for diverse audiences, including executives.
• Build innovative solutions that personalize using user behavior, context signals, and real‑time environmental data.

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, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $ - $ Annually.

This base pay range is specific to California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington state, and Washington DC and may not be applicable to other locations. In addition to a competitive base salary this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location.

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you are a roll‑up‑the‑sleeves and get‑it‑done researcher who can marry scientific rigor with large‑scale engineering. We are looking for someone who has:

• A Ph.D. or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field with emphasis on computer vision, natural language processing.
• Solid background in Multi‑task, Multimodal (Vision + Language) research, building models & algorithms.
• Proven science leadership in defining a science roadmap for a team and mentoring other scientists.
• Track record of publishing high‑impact research in top venues like CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, ACL, and SIGGRAPH.
• Experience developing dialogue systems capable of long conversations, multi‑step reasoning, and context‑rich decision‑making.
• Hands‑on experience fine‑tuning voice‑AI models for automatic speech recognition, turn detection, and speech generation is a bonus.
• Experience with geospatial datasets and 3‑D vision techniques is a bonus.
• Track record of shipping large‑scale, high‑impact consumer‑facing solutions to production and measuring business impact.

Zillow is reimagining real estate to make home a reality for more and more people.

As the most‑visited real estate website in the United States, Zillow® and its affiliates help movers find and win their home through digital solutions, first class partners, and easier…