About Zuora

At Zuora, we help businesses grow smarter and adapt faster. Our platform powers modern business models — from subscriptions and usage-based pricing to AI-driven and outcome-based offerings — helping companies launch new products, automate complex billing, and unlock predictable, recurring revenue.

We’ve led the Subscription Economy for more than a decade. Now we’re evolving again by building the definitive platform for quote to cash and helping companies monetize their products and services with an adaptable, AI-ready foundation.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a strong technical contributor to drive AI/ML innovation and deliver real business impact through intelligent solutions.

You’ll:

• Identify high-impact opportunities using AI/ML to solve customer and business problems
• Partner with stakeholders and influence decisions through data-driven insights
• Build and deploy end-to-end ML models (including LLMs) using structured and unstructured data
• Collaborate with engineering teams to develop scalable data and ML pipelines
• Take full ownership from idea to production, delivering measurable business outcomes

This role is ideal for someone who can combine deep technical expertise with business thinking to simplify complexity and build impactful, production-ready AI solutions.

About You

1. 7+ years of experience in the data science/machine learning domain, preferably with hands-on end-to-end model building experience
2. Curious mind to learn, explore and identify biggest customer opportunities
3. Build strong relationships across both technical and business/product teams, earn trust with leadership
4. Driven towards forming opinions and conclusions through data and experimentation, rather than anecdotes and hearsay
5. Willingness to dive deep into the tech stack as well as hands-on coding
6. Experience in building end to end ML models, across the ML lifecycle
7. Strong communication and leadership presence
8. Technical skills- hands on with scripting required, with knowledge or willingness to learn tools/softwares. Knowledge of R, SQL, Python, Statistical modeling, experience with AWS/Azure/GCP ML suite
9. Experience in the following domains/industries preferred- SaaS, ecommerce, pricing or payments
10. Bachelors/Masters in a technical or natural sciences domain from a top university

Even if you feel like you meet some, but not all of the qualifications, we would love it if you take the time to apply to the role. As we evolve and scale up a relatively new team, we strongly believe that a diverse team structure will accelerate progress towards our objectives.

The Team

Zuora Platform Tech is at the forefront of technological and business transformation, tackling complex, ambiguous problems to drive innovation. As part of the AIMS team (AI, ML, and Science), you’ll work on applying advanced AI and data science to enable total monetization across Zuora’s product suite and beyond.

The team operates at the intersection of AI, business strategy, and product innovation, solving high-impact problems like pricing, forecasting, segmentation, and optimization. The tech stack includes Java, Spring, Microservices, Kafka, Spark, NodeJS, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and AngularJS.

Benefits

Zuora offers a comprehensive total rewards package designed to support ZEOs’ wellbeing, growth, and flexibility. While specific offerings may vary by country, we typically provide:

• Competitive compensation, variable bonus and performance-based reward opportunities, and retirement programs
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Generous, flexible time off, plus paid holidays, wellness days, and a company-wide year-end break
• Paid parental leave (including fully paid leave for eligible ZEOs, subject to local policy)
• Learning & development stipend to support ongoing growth
• Opportunities to volunteer and give back, including charitable donation matching where available
• Mental wellbeing resources and support

*Benefits may vary by location; details will be shared during the interview process

#ZEOLife at Zuora

ZEOs (our employees) are empowered to take ownership, challenge the status quo, and make a real impact. We:

• Collaborate deeply across teams and regions
• Learn constantly and iterate often
• Build an inclusive, high-performance culture where people feel inspired, connected, and valued

Our Commitment to an Inclusive Workplace

Think, be and do you.
At Zuora, different perspectives, experiences, and contributions matter — everyone counts.

Zuora is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to creating an inclusive environment for all. We do not discriminate on the basis of, and consider individuals seeking employment with Zuora without regard to, race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. Applicants in need of special assistance or accommodation during the interview process or in accessing our website may contact us by sending an email to assistance@zuora.com (or local equivalent, where applicable).

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to be the highest-level AI technical authority on the team. This role is above the Applied Scientist level — you set the AI research and engineering direction, own the agentic system architecture, define the eval framework standards, and operate as the primary interface to the external AI research community and internal platform AI leadership. You will combine deep research rigor with relentless production focus: every AI capability you design ships, gets measured, and improves based on evidence.

You are the person who answers: "Is this AI approach the right one, and how do we know when it's working"

Key Responsibilities

• Own the agentic system architecture: define the multi-agent coordination patterns, MCP tool taxonomy, intent-to-skill routing logic, policy enforcement design, and memory management strategy across all AI workflows on the platform.
• Lead the AI evaluation framework: design the golden dataset structure, define eval metrics (RAG retrieval quality, scoring accuracy, LLM response correctness, agentic workflow success rate), and own the CI/CD AI eval pipeline that gates every AI capability release.
• Drive the RAG architecture strategy: chunking strategies for MongoDB and Elasticsearch-indexed documents, embedding model selection and fine-tuning, retrieval reranking design, and hallucination mitigation patterns.
• Own the LLM integration architecture: prompt engineering standards, LLM gateway usage policies, context window management, streaming response patterns, and model version governance.
• Lead applied research initiatives: identify novel techniques (RLHF, Constitutional AI, multi-modal, sparse retrieval) that are practically applicable to automotive retail intelligence use cases and prototype them rigorously in Python.
• Define the hexagonal AI adapter contract standard: the formal interface specification between Python AI services and Java domain cores — ensuring AI infrastructure remains swappable without domain logic changes.
• Act as primary technical interface to platform AI leadership (LLM Gateway, ML Platform, Agentic Engine) — influencing platform roadmap based on teams practical requirements.
• Mentor the Applied Scientist and ML Architect; conduct technical reviews of AI system designs, eval frameworks, and research approaches.
• Publish, present, or contribute to open-source where appropriate — representing Tekion's AI engineering excellence externally.

Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years of applied AI/ML experience with at least 3 years at Staff or Principal level — a track record of shipping AI systems that measurably changed business outcomes.
• Deep expertise across: LLM fine-tuning and alignment, RAG system design (chunking, embedding, retrieval, reranking), agentic frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen), and MCP tool design.
• Python mastery: PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain/LangGraph, scikit-learn, and production ML serving tooling.
• Strong understanding of distributed AI systems: Elasticsearch-backed vector search, Redis/Aerospike serving, Cosmos DB for AI event logging, and Kafka-based feature pipelines.
• Proven ability to design formal eval frameworks for AI systems — not just accuracy metrics but business aligned quality gates.
• Experience defining and enforcing hexagonal adapter contracts between AI services and domain service layers in production systems.
• Track record of communicating complex AI system design to non-technical stakeholders, influencing product roadmaps, and driving cross-team alignment. 

Good to Have

• Publications or significant open-source contributions in NLP, information retrieval, or agentic systems.
• Experience with Constitutional AI, RLAIF, or preference optimization techniques (DPO, PPO).
• Familiarity with multi-modal AI and its application to automotive retail data (images, documents, tabular data fusion).
• Prior experience in a product-focused AI role at a SaaS or platform company — not purely research. 

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive compensation and generous stock options.
• Medical insurance coverage.
• Work with some of the brightest minds from Silicon Valley's most dominant and successful companies.