📍
Seattle, WA

AI Applied Scientist - PhD Intern, Foundational IQ

Internship
Technology & Digital
Software engineering
Posted:
December 28, 2025

Zillow

Real-estate marketplace & housing “super app”
72.8
Palpable Score
Apply >view company >

As a PhD Research Intern on the Foundational IQ team, you will help train and adapt large models that better understand homes and users, advancing representation learning, multimodal modeling, user modeling, and reinforcement/sequential decision‑making for real‑world problems at Zillow scale. You’ll tailor and evaluate LLMs and multimodal foundation models to our domain, build agentic workflows that plan and act across multi‑step tasks, and define success via domain‑specific metrics emphasizing helpfulness, safety, and fairness. You’ll move quickly from prototype to impact, running rigorous offline evaluations and online experiments, collaborating with applied scientists, engineers, and product partners, and contributing to platform capabilities that power experiences like Zillow Copilot. Along the way you’ll author clear research docs, share results internally, and have opportunities to publish and present your work.



Responsibilities include:

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 $104,000.00 - $166,000.00 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 $104,000.00 - $166,000.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.

Who you are

About the company

Zillow

Company overview
Zillow Group runs a major online real estate marketplace focused on helping people find homes to rent or buy in the United States. The company makes money through products for real estate professionals (including agent advertising and software) and through adjacent services such as rentals and mortgage origination. Zillow Group also owns well-known consumer brands in the category, including Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, and HotPads. The company positions the product direction around making home shopping and moving services more integrated for consumers.

Locations and presence

Zillow Group is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and the company operates as a distributed workforce under its “Cloud HQ” model. Job postings are typically labeled by location type (remote, hybrid, office, or field), and teams use offices primarily for collaboration and in-person gatherings rather than daily attendance.

Palpable Score

72.8
/ 100
Zillow Group offers real early-career entry points through a named rotational program and visible new-grad and intern hiring, but the volume and consistency across functions is harder to verify from public listings because many postings are not easily readable without platform access. Zillow Group is unusually explicit in public materials about interview preparation, pay equity work, learning infrastructure, and distributed-work practices, which helps early-career candidates judge fit. Employee sentiment signals look mixed, so the upside is real, but the experience may vary by team.
view full company profile >

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