Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Job Description

Zendesk's people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. Our products help more than 145,000 global brands (AirBnb, Uber, JetBrains, Slack, among others) make their billions of customers happy, every day.

Our team is dedicated to providing a robust full-text search experience for our customers across multiple channels; including help centers and agentic RAG (retrieval-augmented-generation) bots. In collaboration with ML engineers and scientists, we deliver high-quality AI products leveraging the latest tools and techniques, and serve them at a scale that most companies can only dream of. We're passionate about empowering end-users to find what they're looking for, and helping our customers get the most out of their knowledge base.

We're looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our team and play a key role in leveling up the search platform powering Zendesk 

What you'll be doing 

•  Delivering AI-powered capabilities to our customers at Zendesk scale using latest LLM technologies

• Working closely with Product Management, ML Scientists and fellow Engineers both within the team and across the company to define feature scope and implementation strategies, using ML technology

• Mentoring junior team members, as well as pairing with more experienced colleagues to foster mutual learning

• Supporting our deployed services to ensure a high level of stability and reliability

• Writing clean and maintainable code to meet the team's delivery commitments

• Contributing to discussions regarding technical design and best practices

• Here some of the challenges you will be working on:

  • How do we expand our RAG platform to handle new use cases?

  • How do we integrate and improve hybrid search solutions combining vector embeddings and keyword-base retrieval?

  • How do we enhance the ranking of search results?

  • How do we optimize our indexing pipeline for speed and cost-efficiency?

  • How do we best provide a retrieval platform across multiple channels?

  • How do we make the best use of rapidly evolving LLM technologies?

  • And many more

What you bring to the role:Basic Qualifications

• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python or Ruby, along with experience in relevant testing frameworks

• Solid understanding of architecture and software design patterns for server-side and web applications

• Collaborative and growth mindset, with a commitment to ongoing learning and development

• Self-managed, dedicated approach with the ability to work independently

• Experience building scalable and stable software applications

• Ability to formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze results to inform engineering decisions

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience in designing, implementing, and optimizing search solutions, ideally leveraging Machine Learning techniques and Elasticsearch to enhance search relevance and performance

• Experience with managing and deploying cloud services with AWS

• Experience with event-driven, distributed architecture using Kafka

Tech Stack 

• Our codebase is primarily written in Python and Ruby

• Our machine learning models rely on PyTorch

• Our platform is built on AWS

• Data is stored in RDS MySQL, Redis, S3, ElasticSearch, Kafka, and Snowflake 

• Services are deployed on Kubernetes using Docker, Kafka is used for stream processing

• Infrastructure health is monitored using Datadog and Sentry

What we offer

• Team of passionate people who love what they do

• Exciting opportunity to work on RAG (retrieval-augmented-generation), a rapidly evolving field in AI and natural language processing

• Ownership of the product features at scale, making a significant impact for millions of customers

• Opportunity to learn and grow

• Possibility to specialise in areas such as security, performance, and reliability

• Team of passionate people who love what they do

• Exciting opportunity to work on RAG (retrieval-augmented-generation), a rapidly evolving field in AI and natural language processing

• Ownership of the product features at scale, making a significant impact for millions of customers

• Opportunity to learn and grow

• Possibility to specialise in areas such as security, performance, and reliability

About Zendesk

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement. They give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth. 

More than 100,000 paid customer accounts in over 150 countries and territories use Zendesk products.  Based  in  San  Francisco,  Zendesk  has operations  in  the  United  States,  Europe,  Asia,  Australia,  and  South  America.

Interested in knowing what we do in the community? Check out the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation to learn more about how we engage with, and provide support to, our local communities.  

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we're proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment 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, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes.  Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where Zendesk may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk's use of your personal information.  

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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.

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