Senior Machine Learning Engineer

<h2>Job Description</h2><p></p><p><span>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.</span></p><p><span>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.</span></p><p><span>We're looking for a </span>Senior ML Engineer<span> to lead the next wave of GenAI infrastructure at Zendesk. This includes our internal research platform, LLM Proxy, A/B Testing &amp; 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.</span></p><p><span>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.</span><br/> </p><h2>What you get to do every day</h2><ul><li><p><span>Help build benchmarking frameworks for LLMs, including A/B, Offline Evals testing capabilities to assess quality, latency, and cost trade-offs.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Contribute to the design and implementation of Zendesk’s LLM Proxy to enable safe, observable, and cost-optimized access to multiple foundation models.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Partner with applied ML, product, and platform teams to ensure GenAI infrastructure meets the needs of diverse product use cases.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Implement best practices for monitoring, observability, rate-limiting, and cost attribution for LLM services.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Establish strong engineering practices around observability, reliability, security, and cost monitoring.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Work on orchestration tooling to enable multi-step, tool-using AI agents that integrate with Zendesk’s products</span></p></li></ul><p></p><h2>What you bring to the role</h2><ul><li><p><span>5+ years in developing and deploying ML systems in production, with hands-on experience in scaling infrastructure and ensuring service reliability.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Familiarity with core ML infrastructure components such as model registries, feature stores, orchestration tools, and inference serving systems.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Understanding of LLM systems, GenAI applications, or ML/AI platform components such as vector databases, serving layers, and orchestration tools.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure; Kubernetes; Docker; and distributed systems.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Proficiency in at least one server-side language (Python, Java, Scala, Golang, or Ruby) and solid grounding in testing and CI/CD workflows.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Understanding of architecture principles and patterns for building scalable, resilient backend services.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Experience taking projects from design to production deployment, with a focus on maintainability and performance.</span></p></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Preferred Qualifications</b></p><ul><li><p><span>Agentic and Automation: Experience with AI technologies in automating processes and developing agentic solutions and frameworks</span></p></li><li><p><span>Experience building tools that improve </span>developer productivity<span> and platform adoption across multiple teams.</span></p></li></ul><p></p><p><b>What our tech stack looks like</b></p><ul><li><p><span>Our code is written in Python.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Our servers live in AWS.</span></p></li><li><p><span>LLM Vendors</span>:<span> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Llama</span></p></li><li><p>Infra:<span> Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, AWS </span></p></li></ul><p></p><p><b>What we offer</b></p><ul><li><p><span>Full ownership of the projects you work on.</span></p></li><li><p><span>What you will be doing will have a huge impact.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Team of passionate people who love what they do.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Exciting projects, ability to implement your own ideas and improvements.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Opportunity to learn and grow.</span></p></li></ul><p></p><p><b>...and everything you need to be effective and maintain work-life balance</b></p><ul><li><p><span>Flexible working hours.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Professional development funds.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Comfortable office and a remote setup.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Choice of your laptop and other equipment.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Premium Medical Insurance as well as Private Life Assurance.</span></p></li></ul><p><br/><span>#LI-KM7</span></p><p></p><p><span>Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience pack