Prompt Engineer/ML Engineer

Job Description

Zendesks people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. Our products help more than 125000 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.

Were looking for a Prompt Engineer at the ML Engineer II level to design test and optimize the prompts system messages and evaluation strategies that power Zendesks GenAI features. Youll work closely with applied ML teams product managers and researchers to ensure LLM outputs are accurate safe and aligned with product goals.

This is a hands-on experimentation-heavy role perfect for someone who blends strong ML engineering skills with deep curiosity about language models and a passion for improving AI output quality.

What you get to do every day

• Create and refine prompts system messages and instructions for a variety of LLM-powered Zendesk products.

• Work with ML engineers to design automated and human-in-the-loop evaluation pipelines for prompt performance accuracy and safety.

• Run structured experiments to compare prompts parameter settings and model variants using A/B testing and offline benchmarks.

• Adapt prompts for multiple LLM providers (OpenAI Anthropic Google Llama) while maintaining consistency in behavior.

• Maintain prompt libraries guidelines and best practices to accelerate development across teams.

What you bring to the role

• 24 years of ML NLP or software engineering experience with exposure to production-grade AI systems.

• Understanding of how prompts temperature system instructions and context windows impact LLM behavior.

• Experience designing or running experiments to assess model output quality accuracy and safety.

• Proficiency in Python with experience in data analysis scripting and working with APIs.

• Ability to identify failure cases debug prompt behavior and iterate quickly.

• Ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams and take feedback constructively.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with prompt engineering or prompt chaining for LLMs.

• Knowledge of few-shot and zero-shot prompt design.

• Familiarity with vector databases retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and grounding techniques.

• Exposure to agentic frameworks such as LangChain Haystack or semantic workflow engines.

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 were 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.