Zendesk’s people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. Our products help more than 125,000 global brands (AirBnb, Uber, JetBrains, Slack, among others) make their billions of customers happy, every day.
The AI/ML Platform team is at the forefront of this mission. We build the foundation that powers every AI-driven experience at Zendesk, enabling product teams to build, evaluate, and deploy state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM) applications reliably and at scale.
We're looking for a Staff ML Engineer to build the next wave of GenAI infrastructure at Zendesk. This includes our internal research platform, LLM Proxy, A/B Testing & Evaluation benchmarking, agentic workflow orchestration tools. You’ll empower Zendesk’s ML/AI teams by building secure, cost-optimized, and developer-friendly ML platforms that scale across use cases and products.
You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product, Architects, and Tech Leads to ensure the platform strategy is tightly aligned with company goals, while ensuring the delivery of robust, scalable, and production-ready systems.
What you get to do every day
Lead the design, rollout, and optimization of ML Platform components including model serving, feature management, training pipelines, and evaluation frameworks.
Own the design, rollout, and optimization of Zendesk’s LLM Proxy, enabling safe, observable, and cost-efficient access to multiple foundation models.
Champion best practices around service resilience, observability, cost efficiency, and performance optimization.
Partner with stakeholders to ensure platform investments align with Zendesk’s AI/ML roadmap and business priorities.
Foster a culture of technical excellence, inclusion, and mentorship within the engineering team.
Foster a team culture that emphasizes mentorship, inclusion, and technical excellence.
What you bring to the role
7+ years of hands-on experience developing and deploying ML models or Generative AI. Proven success in production deployments with a focus on scalability, reliability, and availability
Familiarity with MLOps best practices (CI/CD for ML, model monitoring, automated retraining pipelines).
Deep understanding of LLM systems, GenAI applications, or ML/AI platform components such as vector databases, serving layers, and orchestration tools.
Experience with provisioning and deploying services with a cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure).
Fluency in any server-side programming language and the testing frameworks (Python, Java, Scala, Golang, Ruby).
Sound understanding of architecture and software design patterns for server-side domains.
Experience owning the full lifecycle of ML/AI platform components from early design to production deployment.
Preferred Qualifications
Agentic and Automation: Experience with AI technologies in automating processes and developing agentic solutions and frameworks
Experience building tools that improve developer productivity and platform adoption across multiple teams.
What our tech stack looks like
Our code is written in Python.
Our servers live in AWS.
LLM Vendors: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Llama
Infra: Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, AWS
What we offer
Full ownership of the projects you work on.
What you will be doing will have a huge impact.
Team of passionate people who love what they do.
Exciting projects, ability to implement your own ideas and improvements.
Opportunity to learn and grow.
...and everything you need to be effective and maintain work-life balance
Flexible working hours.
Professional development funds.
Comfortable office and a remote setup.
Choice of your laptop and other equipment.
Premium Medical Insurance as well as Private Life Assurance.
Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.
The intelligent heart of customer experience
Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.
Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.
Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.
Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.