Lead AI Research Engineer

Hồ Chí Minh

Full-time

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;