AI Applied Scientist - PhD Intern, NLP/LLMs/Conversational AI

About The Team

At Zillow, we’re on a mission to give people the power to unlock life’s next chapter. We’re creating innovative, connected, and equitable solutions to help people move from dreaming to transacting.

We apply many AI models - such as the Zestimate for price predictions or recommenders for personalizing content - with a variety of impact on our customers. In addition, many new ML/NLP models are being considered for solving our newest business priorities.

About The Role

We are hiring interns (remote positions) for summer 2025! As an intern, you will have the opportunity to innovate for our customers and our business. Your groundbreaking work will help us evolve our key systems, including copilots and applications in search, discovery, and valuation. We are eager to partner with hardworking students interested in pushing the state-of-the-art in the high-impact research areas of NLP, Conversational AI, and Large Language model use cases including instruction tuning, tool use, reasoning, and agentic behaviors.

Our team has an open attitude towards research, and we encourage publications and continuing collaborations. Many of our past interns have submissions and publications at top conferences such as RecSys and KDD as a product of intern research and team collaboration.

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.

Who You Are

• A PhD graduate student working towards a degree in computer science, NLP, machine learning, or another applicable field.
• Strong understanding of NLP and ML fundamentals.
• Experience with training/fine-tuning BART, T5, GPT, other LLMs for NLP tasks.
• Experience with Large Language Models, including new modeling techniques, prompt engineering, instruction tuning, reasoning, and tool use.
• Experience with common deep learning frameworks.
• Experience in curating large scale datasets.
• Good understanding of ML lifecycle.
• Has a good publication record or is highly motivated towards publishing at top-tier scientific conferences (such as EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, ICASSP, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, SIGGRAPH).

Get to Know Us

Zillow is reimagining real estate to make home a reality for more and more people. As the most-visited real estate website in the United States, Zillow® and its affiliates help movers find and win their home through digital solutions, first-class partners, and easier buying, selling, financing, and renting experiences. Millions of people visit Zillow Group sites every month to start their home search, and now they can rely on Zillow to help make it easier to move. The work we do helps people get home and no matter what job you're in, you will play a critical role in making home a reality for more and more people.

Our efforts to streamline the real estate transaction are supported by a deep-rooted culture of innovation, our passion to redefine the employee experience, a fundamental commitment to Equity and Belonging, and world-class benefits. These benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverages as well as parental leave, family benefits, retirement contributions, and paid time off. We’re also setting the standard for work experiences of the future, where our employees are supported in doing their best work and living a flexible, well-balanced life.

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.

Applicants who receive job offers from Zillow Group will be asked to sign a Proprietary Rights Agreement which includes confidentiality, intellectual property assignment, customer and employee non-solicitation, and non-competition provisions.