Applied Scientist at Zillow

About the team

Zillow’s AI organization builds the intelligence that powers Zillow’s mission to make home a reality for more people - across buying, selling, renting, and financing.
The Connections AI team is building the intelligence and decisioning systems that help real estate agents and loan officers operate as a coordinated team in service of the customer. Our work sits at the core of Zillow’s long-term vision for a more connected, agentic transaction experience, linking signals, context, and actions across Zillow’s agent experiences, CRM tools, and home financing products.

We build the foundational systems that turn fragmented behavioral, conversational, and operational signals into shared intelligence and actionable recommendations. Our work spans real-time signal ingestion, structured and unstructured data understanding, ranking and prioritization, explainable decisioning, and agentic execution. We operate at the intersection of LLMs, agentic AI, classical ML, and complex cross-system data, partnering closely with product, engineering, design, analytics, and business stakeholders to ensure the systems we build are useful, trustworthy, explainable, and scalable.

About the role

As an Applied Scientist on the Connections AI team, you will be a trusted contributor to the team, building the AI and machine learning systems that turn messy, real-world transaction and communication data into useful intelligence and better partner workflows. You will exercise your judgment to refine and decompose problems into manageable tasks. Your work will focus primarily on propensity, ranking, prediction, and decisioning systems, with Generative AI used selectively where it adds clear value.

You Will Get To

• Build and improve applied ML systems.Develop, evaluate, and improve models that help identify customer readiness, prioritize opportunities, and recommend the next best action in partner workflows.

• Work with large, messy, real-world data.Use behavioral, conversational, operational, and CRM data to create features, analyze performance, and improve model quality.

• Design strong evaluation for both ML and GenAI.Define offline and online evaluation approaches, select metrics tied to business outcomes, and help build trustworthy evaluation methods for generative AI features such as summaries or recommendations.

• Prototype and test new ideas.Independently explore new models and enhancements to existing models, and assess trade-offs through careful experimentation. Stay current with academic and industry advances, present key learnings internally, and translate promising ideas into practical improvements.

• Partner across disciplines.Work closely with product managers, engineers, and other scientists to refine problem statements, translate requirements into measurable objectives, and ship production-ready solutions.

• Contribute to reliable production science.Write clear, well-tested code for data preparation, training, and evaluation, and bring models to a state ready for integration into production systems.

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, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $136,300.00 - $217,700.00 annually. This base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations. In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont the standard base pay range for this role is $129,500.00 - $206,900.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations 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. Employees in this role will not be paid below the salary threshold for exempt employees in the state where they reside.

Who you are

Required

• Applied ML experience.You have 3+ years experience in an academic or industry setting applying machine learning to real-world problems, building and improving models.

• Strength in classical machine learning models.You have solid fundamentals in supervised learning, ranking, classification, regression, feature engineering, and practical model iteration.

• Evaluation-first mindset.You have experience designing and analyzing experiments, choosing metrics thoughtfully, spotting issues in measurement, and knowing how to apply correct evaluation methods that align with the problem being solved.

• Experience with messy and unstructured data.You are comfortable working with imperfect real-world datasets, including text or event data, and understand how data quality and bias affect modeling outcomes.

• Strong coding skills.You are proficient in Python and common ML tooling, and you write clean, tested, maintainable code.

• Collaborative problem solver.You communicate assumptions, trade-offs, and results clearly, and work effectively with engineering and product partners.

Preferred

• NLP or language-data experience.Experience working with text-heavy products or datasets such as messages, transcripts, notes, or other communication data.

• Generative AI evaluation experience.Experience evaluating LLM-based features, including human evaluation, rubric-based review, LLM-as-judge approaches, or safety and quality guardrails.

• Marketplace or workflow optimization experience.Experience with recommendation, ranking, prioritization, or decision-support systems.

• Big data tooling.Experience using tools such as SQL, Spark, or Databricks to work with large-scale datasets.

• Advanced degree.M.S. or Ph.D. in computer science, statistics, machine learning, or a related field.

Get to know us

At Zillow, we’re reimagining how people move—through the real estate market and through their careers. As the most-visited real estate platform in the U.S., we help customers navigate buying, selling, financing and renting with greater ease and confidence. Whether you're working in tech, sales, operations, or design, you’ll be part of a company that's reshaping an industry and helping more people make home a reality.

Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the country. Zillow was named one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® in 2025, and included on the PEOPLE Companies That Care® 2025 list, reflecting our commitment to creating an innovative, inclusive, and engaging culture where employees are empowered to grow.

No matter where you sit in the organization, your work will help drive innovation, support our customers, and move the industry—and your career—forward, together.

Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact your recruiter directly.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable state and local law.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.