Senior Machine Learning Engineer, AI/ML Infrastructure

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 Senior ML Engineer to lead 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 Staff Engineers, Tech Leads, Product Managers, and other ML teams to deliver robust, production-grade systems that accelerate the impact of AI across Zendesk.

• Help build benchmarking frameworks for LLMs, including A/B, Offline Evals testing capabilities to assess quality, latency, and cost trade-offs.

• Contribute to the design and implementation of Zendesk's LLM Proxy to enable safe, observable, and cost-optimized access to multiple foundation models.

• Partner with applied ML, product, and platform teams to ensure GenAI infrastructure meets the needs of diverse product use cases.

• Implement best practices for monitoring, observability, rate-limiting, and cost attribution for LLM services.

• Establish strong engineering practices around observability, reliability, security, and cost monitoring.

• Work on orchestration tooling to enable multi-step, tool-using AI agents that integrate with Zendesk's products

• 5+ years in developing and deploying ML systems in production, with hands-on experience in scaling infrastructure and ensuring service reliability.

• Familiarity with core ML infrastructure components such as model registries, feature stores, orchestration tools, and inference serving systems.

• Understanding of LLM systems, GenAI applications, or ML/AI platform components such as vector databases, serving layers, and orchestration tools.

• Experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure; Kubernetes; Docker; and distributed systems.

• Proficiency in at least one server-side language (Python, Java, Scala, Golang, or Ruby) and solid grounding in testing and CI/CD workflows.

• Understanding of architecture principles and patterns for building scalable, resilient backend services.

• Experience taking projects from design to production deployment, with a focus on maintainability and performance.

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.

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.
   

#LI-KM7

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.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

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 with your specific accommodation request.