Zalo

Lead AI Research Engineer, Zalo AI

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · On site · Lead

We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to lead the development of our LLM-powered products at Zalo AI. You will own the technical direction for models and agent systems, lead a team of AI engineers, and act as the technical owner of your product line — deciding what to build, why it matters, and how success is measured.

What you will do

  • Own the model lifecycle: Train, fine-tune, evaluate and optimize large language models for our target domains and languages;
  • Design agent systems: Architect LLM and agentic systems with clear quality, latency and cost budgets;
  • Lead the team: Mentor and grow AI engineers, and own the team's delivery;
  • Own the product: Shape the roadmap with product and business stakeholders, define success metrics, and prioritize against impact and cost;
  • Stay at the frontier: Track the fast-moving LLM landscape, run structured experiments, and decide pragmatically what to adopt or build.

What you will need

  • 5+ years of professional experience as an AI engineer, including at least 3 years working hands-on with LLMs or agent systems;
  • Deep experience with the modern LLM/Agent stack;
  • Proven track record of training or fine-tuning LLMs — not just prompting hosted APIs;
  • Solid experience designing agentic and retrieval-based systems;
  • Strong grasp of LLM evaluation and experiment design;
  • Demonstrated experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers, with clear ownership of outcomes.
    Nice to have:
  • Strong software architecture fundamentals;
  • Strong product sense and stakeholder communication;

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