Software Engineer, AI Foundation

Zip is the AI platform for enterprise procurement, designed to facilitate collaboration between humans and AI agents. It orchestrates procurement across teams, tools, and suppliers through AI agents, enabling companies to innovate faster. Trusted by leading enterprises like T-Mobile, OpenAI, AMD, Mars, and Dollar Tree, Zip has helped save over $8 billion and processed over $500 billion in spend. The team includes product leaders from Apple, Airbnb, and Meta, and former procurement leaders from major companies. Backed by prominent investors including Adams Street, Alkeon, BOND, CRV, DST, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator, Zip has raised $371 million at a $2.2 billion valuation and has been recognized by Forbes Fintech 50 and Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies.

Introduction

Zip is seeking a Mid to Senior Level Software Engineer for its AI Foundations team. In this role, you will be crucial in building and owning the core platform that powers all AI-driven products at Zip, focusing on shared infrastructure for agentic orchestration, document processing, and retrieval systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the core agentic platform for Zip's AI products, including orchestration, memory, retrieval, and document processing infrastructure.
• Own end-to-end delivery of platform capabilities, from architectural decisions through production, influencing the broader engineering organization's approach to AI.
• Collaborate with product teams across Zip to understand needs, identify shared patterns, and deliver reusable infrastructure to enhance quality across various AI products (Intake AI, Chatbot, IP Agent, Contract Orchestration, Payments).
• Advance applied AI engineering by working with LLM orchestration (e.g., LangGraph), RAG pipelines, agentic document parsing, and self-correcting memory systems.
• Develop and improve evaluation frameworks and observability tools to increase the reliability of AI systems over time.
• Translate ambiguous, open-ended problems into well-scoped technical solutions independently.

Requirements

• BS or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or math).
• 3+ years of backend or full-stack software engineering experience in a production environment.
• Strong proficiency in Python; experience with async frameworks and distributed systems is a plus.
• Hands-on experience building or operating LLM-based applications, such as RAG pipelines, tool use, agents, or evaluation systems.
• Experience with data pipelines, job scheduling (e.g., Airflow), and vector databases or embedding-based search.
• Comfortable with observability tooling: tracing, logging, metrics, and alerting in production AI systems.
• Proven track record of end-to-end ownership, ensuring solutions work effectively in production.
• Ability to tackle ambiguous, open-ended problems and drive them to completion with minimal supervision.
• A platform-oriented mindset, designing for reuse beyond immediate use cases.
• Exposure to AI-driven automation or interest in collaborating with AI/ML teams to build intelligent workflows.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with LangChain, LangGraph, or similar agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience with document parsing or OCR pipelines (PDF, DOCX, XLSX extraction).
• Background in ML platform, developer tooling, or internal platform engineering.
• Prior experience with evaluation frameworks for AI/ML systems.
• Experience at a fast-moving startup with broad, cross-functional responsibilities.
• Exposure to procurement, finance, or enterprise SaaS domains.

Benefits

• Startup equity
• 100% health, vision & dental coverage options
• Catered breakfast, lunch, & dinner
• Flexible PTO
• ClassPass membership
• Monthly commuter benefit
• Team building events & happy hours
• Home office stipend
• Phone/internet reimbursement
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility stipend
• 401k plan
• Unlimited AI token usage

About Company

Zip is the AI platform for enterprise procurement, designed to facilitate collaboration between humans and AI agents. It orchestrates procurement across teams, tools, and suppliers through AI agents, enabling companies to innovate faster. Trusted by leading enterprises like T-Mobile, OpenAI, AMD, Mars, and Dollar Tree, Zip has helped save over $8 billion and processed over $500 billion in spend. The team includes product leaders from Apple, Airbnb, and Meta, and former procurement leaders from major companies. Backed by prominent investors including Adams Street, Alkeon, BOND, CRV, DST, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator, Zip has raised $371 million at a $2.2 billion valuation and has been recognized by Forbes Fintech 50 and Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies.

How to Apply

We encourage all candidates to apply, even if your experience doesn't exactly match the job description. Zip is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workspace.