As a Software Engineer on Zip’s AI Foundations team, you will design and build the core agentic platform that powers all AI-driven products at the company, including orchestration, memory, retrieval, and document processing infrastructure. You will operate with significant technical autonomy, making architecture decisions from scratch to influence how the broader engineering organization builds AI systems. This role involves partnering closely with product teams to understand their needs and ship reusable infrastructure that enhances quality across multiple platforms simultaneously. Key responsibilities include pushing the frontier of applied AI engineering by working on LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, agentic document parsing, and self-correcting memory systems, while also building eval frameworks and observability tooling for reliable AI systems. The ideal candidate has 3+ years of backend or full-stack experience, strong Python proficiency, and hands-on experience with distributed systems, vector databases, and observability tools like tracing and logging in production environments.
Design and build the core agentic platform including orchestration, memory, retrieval, and document processing.
Own end-to-end delivery of platform capabilities from architecture to production with influence over engineering organization.
Partner with product teams to understand needs and ship reusable infrastructure that raises quality across multiple products.
Push the frontier of applied AI engineering by working on LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, and self-correcting memory systems.
Build eval frameworks and observability tooling to make AI systems measurably more reliable over time.
What we're looking for
3+ years of backend or full-stack software engineering experience in a production environment.
Strong Python proficiency and hands-on experience with async frameworks and distributed systems.
Experience building or operating LLM-based applications, including RAG pipelines and eval systems.
Proficiency with data pipelines, job scheduling tools (Airflow), and vector databases.
Comfortable with observability tooling: tracing, logging, metrics, and alerting in production AI systems.
Track record of owning problems end-to-end, ensuring solutions work effectively in production.
Market check
Salary context
This
$160,000–$260,000
range sits above
60%
of similar postings on FindRole.
Peer median band
$151,250–$234,000
Median floor and ceiling across peers.
Typical midpoint (25–75%)
$158,375–$235,750
Middle half of comparable postings.
Based on 240 comparable postings.*
* 240 is the maximum number of comparable postings sampled.
Employer
About Zip
Zip Co is a global buy-now, pay-later company offering flexible installment payment solutions to consumers and merchants, enabling interest-free purchases across retail, travel, and healthcare. Industry: Financial Technology & Consumer Lending
Zip currently has
13 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$125,000–$175,000
across 12 roles with salary data.