Zillow · 23 hours ago
Distinguished Scientist
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$271K/yr - $432K/yr
10+ years expZillow is at the forefront of transforming the real estate industry through advanced AI technologies. The Distinguished Scientist will define and drive the technical vision for long-horizon, supervised agentic systems, focusing on designing agent architectures and leveraging unique datasets to enhance user experiences in real estate transactions.
MarketplaceOnline PortalsPropTechReal Estate
Responsibilities
Own the end-to-end research and technical strategy for long-horizon agentic experiences across shopping, financing, and professional workflows, in close partnership with the Agentic AI, data platform, and product teams
Design and advance LLM post-training and evaluation methods (e.g., SFT, preference learning, RLHF/RLAIF, long-context modeling) tailored to supervised, high-stakes journeys in a complex, regulated domain
Architect systems that combine persistent memory, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration to deliver consistent, context-rich guidance over long timelines
Translate Zillow’s heterogeneous data (text, voice, behavioral, and structured real-estate/transaction data) into agent-ready knowledge and signals, in partnership with data and platform teams
Collaborate with product and design to define success metrics, evaluation frameworks, and experiment plans for agentic experiences, including human-in-the-loop supervision and safety reviews
Operate as a senior IC with the option to lead a small pod (up to ~5 scientists/engineers) focused on long-horizon agentic systems, mentoring principal-level talent and setting a high technical bar
Represent Zillow’s work externally through publications, talks, open-source contributions, and thoughtful engagement with the research community, helping position Zillow as a destination for top agentic AI talent
Qualification
Required
A PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field—or equivalent experience—with emphasis in areas such as foundational LLMs, agentic AI, reinforcement learning, AI planning, or natural language processing
10+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying large-scale AI systems, including at least several years focused on agent-based systems, multi-agent collaboration, or long-horizon conversational assistants
Deep, current expertise in generative and agentic AI, including multimodal foundation models, transformers, advanced reasoning models, and post-training techniques (SFT, DPO, RLHF/RLAIF, preference learning, etc.)
A track record of leading ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from concept to production—framing the problem, shaping data strategy, designing models and evaluation, and iterating based on live metrics and user feedback
Demonstrated impact in the research community through publications at top venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR) and/or widely used open-source contributions in LLMs, agentic frameworks, or related areas
Experience designing evaluation and supervision frameworks for long-horizon agents, ideally in regulated or high-stakes domains such as finance, healthcare, or large-scale marketplaces, with an emphasis on safety, fairness, and trust
Strong technical leadership skills: you mentor senior scientists and engineers, create clarity amid ambiguity, and build alignment across research, engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders
Excellent communication skills with the ability to distill complex ideas into clear narratives for executives, cross-functional partners, and external audiences
Benefits
Equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location
Company
Zillow
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace for finding and sharing information about homes, real estate, and mortgages. It is a sub-organization of Zillow Group.
5001-10000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Zillow has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (179)
2024 (150)
2023 (171)
2022 (256)
2021 (239)
2020 (195)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$96.63MKey Investors
Legg MasonPAR Capital Management
2016-08-01Post Ipo Equity
2014-04-01Post Ipo Equity
2012-12-12Post Ipo Equity· $4.13M
Leadership Team
Lloyd Frink
Co-Founder & Co-Executive Chair
Rich Barton
Co-founder and Co-Executive Chair
Recent News
Crowdfund Insider
2026-01-14
Company data provided by crunchbase