Principal AI Engineer / AI Architect

Title- Principal Engineer for Generative and Agentic AI
Location- NY- Remote
Direct Hire

Job Description-
we re hiring our first Principal Engineer for Generative and Agentic AI. This isn t a support role. It s a foundational seat on the team and a key member of our in-house innovation group. If you ve spent your career at the frontier of AI, this is your opportunity to build from the ground up in a greenfield environment with enterprise-grade ambition.
You ll collaborate across engineering, product, design, and applied research to transform emerging agentic AI patterns into resilient, production-grade systems. This isn t about chasing trends, we re focused on delivering intelligent, self-improving solutions that drive real outcomes. If you re energized by the opportunity to help define the future of autonomous, AI-native software, we d love to connect.

Interesting problems you ll get to solve
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.

What you ll bring to the team
Minimum Qualifications
BS and MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field; PhD in AI, ML, or a related domain strongly preferred.
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.

Technical Expertise
Deep expertise in backend systems and distributed architecture; Python required; additional fluency in languages such as C#, C++, Go, or Rust are a plus.
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, Google Cloud Platform, 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.
Understanding of Agile methodologies, specifically in Scrum, and Service Now DevOps practices.