Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Zendesk’s people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. 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.