Principal Engineer, Generative & Agentic AI

Zip Co is a digital financial services company that is reimagining its platform with Generative AI and Agentic systems. They are seeking a Principal Engineer for Generative and Agentic AI to design and deliver AI-native architectures, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and build intelligent systems that enhance the customer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build intelligent, autonomous systems that directly enhance the customer experience, enabling AI-powered interactions, personalized repayment journeys, intelligent support agents, and the foundation for a new generation of AI-first products in a dynamic, regulated fintech environment
• Prototype quickly, scale deliberately, evaluating emerging frameworks and models, running experiments, and hardening the most promising approaches for production deployment in real-world financial systems
• Collaborate across engineering, product, design, compliance, and applied research to identify high-impact use cases and deliver intelligent systems that are resilient, secure, and deeply aligned with user needs
• Architect the AI foundation, selecting and integrating the right mix of LLMs, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, memory strategies, and tooling to give our agentic systems both intelligence and structure
• Champion and evangelize AI-powered engineering, establish and uphold best practices across performance, observability, scalability, and responsible AI, ensuring that everything we build operates with trust, regulatory compliance, and enterprise-grade reliability at scale
• Mentor and inspire engineers, cultivating a culture of technical depth, curiosity, and bold innovation as we grow ZIP’s AI capabilities from team-level efforts to a core pillar of our platform strategy
• Build fast and learn faster, operating with urgency, deploying frequently, and using real feedback from customers and stakeholders to iterate and improve continuously
• Stay at the frontier of agentic AI, tracking new developments across academia and industry, and selectively introducing promising techniques that align with our mission to deliver intelligent, adaptive, and customer-centric fintech experiences

Requirements:

• BS and MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years of focused, hands-on work with Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, and generative AI systems
• Demonstrated success leading the design, development, and deployment of production-grade AI/ML systems, including large-scale inference, context management, and continuous learning
• Deep expertise in backend systems and distributed architecture; Python required
• Extensive experience with agent frameworks, memory/contextual planning systems, and orchestration of long-running, stateful agents
• Strong command of cloud-native development, microservices, and MLOps pipelines (e.g., with Azure, GCP, AWS)
• Architect-level skill in breaking down complex, emergent problems into scalable, modular, and maintainable systems
• Applied experience integrating RLHF, embedding models, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and vector databases into modern applications
• Exceptional ability to mentor, influence, and align cross-functional engineering teams without formal authority
• Strong collaborator across product, design, data science, and security
• High emotional intelligence and low-ego leadership style; comfortable driving alignment in ambiguous and high-stakes environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics to executive stakeholders and non-technical teams
• You are a builder at heart, driven by intellectual curiosity and a desire to push boundaries in how machines learn and operate
• You care deeply about system resilience, ethical AI, data privacy, and customer trust
• You thrive in early-stage initiatives, and are energized by ambiguity, iteration, and bold goals
• Clear communicator and thoughtful builder—able to mentor, align, and influence without ego
• High intellectual curiosity, ownership mindset, and a passion for building systems that learn, adapt, and improve
• PhD in AI, ML, or a related domain strongly preferred
• Additional fluency in languages such as C#, C++, Go, or Rust are a plus
• Experience in regulated domains (e.g., fintech, healthcare) is a plus