Applied AI Engineer

The Zeal Company (TZCO) is a technology holdings company that creates, acquires, operates and invests in businesses built for the long term. We provide capital, technology and operational support. Our approach is hands on, highly technical, geared towards building with outlier talent with "forever timeline". TZCO is built by founders and quality shareholders.

Our team is small, highly motivated and focused on operational excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity in unstructured environments. We operate with a flat organizational structure. All team members are expected to be hands on and to contribute directly to the company's mission. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence. Work ethic and strong prioritization skills are important. All team members are expected to have strong communication skills.

All team members become owners and are expected to behave as such and share the upside created. Incentive design is important.

About the Role

Applied AI at TZCO means deploying agent systems in production to deliver outcomes. This is not a research position. You will build, ship and maintain AI systems that solve real problems for real customers across our portfolio.

You will work directly with customers to understand their problems, then design and deploy agent systems that address them. You own the full cycle: scoping the problem, architecting the solution, building it, putting it in production and making sure it works.

The work is highly technical. You should be deep in the stack, comfortable with LLMs, agent frameworks, tool use, retrieval systems and the infrastructure required to run all of it reliably. You should also be someone who genuinely enjoys being close to the customer and the problem.

Who You Are

You have built and deployed AI systems that people actually use.

You are technical and hands on. You write code every day with CLIs or IDEs and your output and code quality have both improved over the last 12 months.

You are comfortable working directly with customers. You listen well and translate messy problems into working systems.

You move fast and ship. You have a bias for getting things into production rather than perfecting them in isolation.

You have strong opinions about how agent systems should be built, grounded in experience.

You thrive in unstructured environments. You don't wait to be told what to do.

You care about outcomes. The point is to solve the problem.

Compensation

Annual Salary Range

$150,000 to $280,000 USD

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at TZCO, which also includes equity and comprehensive medical.