below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
68%
of similar roles. Most pay
$194,875–$259,000
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$254k
versus about
$227k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Zillow
Zillow Group is a leading real estate and rental marketplace providing consumers with data, tools, and services to find, buy, sell, rent, and finance homes, and connecting buyers with agents and lenders. Industry: Real Estate Technology & Marketplace
Zillow currently has
49 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$164,400–$262,600
across 40 roles with salary data.
The Principal Applied Scientist, Generative AI joins the Agentic Foundations team to build foundational AI technologies for home shopping experiences. This role involves setting the scientific direction for large language models, leading a group of applied scientists, and defining the research agenda for LLM post-training, reward modeling, and evaluation of agentic systems. The successful candidate will translate state-of-the-art research into practical improvements, driving high-impact problems from product vision to experiments and models. Required expertise includes deep hands-on experience with foundation models, post-training techniques like SFT, DPO, RLHF, and RFT/GRPO, and proficiency in Python and PyTorch. The work focuses on developing agentic skills for the home-shopping journey, including search, personalized guidance, offer strategy, and financing, while solving complex technical problems in generative AI.
What does a Applied Scientist earn?
Median $208800 from 61 postings across 10 companies.
Define the research agenda for LLM post-training, reward modeling, and agentic system evaluation.
Lead and grow a group of applied scientists by providing technical direction and mentorship.
Drive ambiguous, high-impact problems from initial product vision to final experiments and models.
Translate state-of-the-art generative AI research into practical improvements for consumer-facing products.
Communicate scientific strategy and research results to executives and cross-functional partners.
Oversee the development of models and data required to power Zillow's AI assistant.
What we're looking for
Must have a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or a master's degree with equivalent research experience.
Must have deep, hands-on expertise in large language models or foundation models, including post-training, reward modeling, or LLM evaluation.
Must have a track record of leading teams of scientists or engineers while staying technically hands-on, or leading a research group with a strong publication record.
Must be able to independently scope and solve ambiguous problems and influence technical direction across teams.
Must be proficient in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch, with the ability to read, debug, and guide experimental code.
Publications at top venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, or EMNLP (preferred).
Experience applying LLMs in consumer-facing products at scale (preferred).
Experience with agentic AI systems, their evaluation, reinforcement learning, or preference learning (preferred).
Python
C++
PyTorch
TensorFlow
Generative AI
Reinforcement Learning
Large Language Models
deep-learning
Distributed Training
Data Processing
Statistics
Probabilistic Modeling