Staff Machine Learning Scientist
Staff Machine Learning Scientist
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Job Description
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.
Our team is responsible for helping Customer Experience teams to achieve their best by intelligently solving repetitive work so they can shift their focus to solving more sophisticated problems. We use the latest trends in Machine Learning and AI algorithms to help us on that mission and were passionate about empowering our customers.
As a Staff Machine Learning Scientist you are a recognized leader and domain expert responsible for advancing the state-of-the-art in ML/AI for customer service at a global scale. You steer research vision mentor scientists across teams and drive adoption of foundational models powering Zendesks most impactful features.
What you get to do every day
Lead end-to-end design development and deployment of novel ML/LLM models and algorithmsdefining research agendas that shape Zendesks AI-powered roadmap.
Pioneer large complex initiatives across product lines such as building multilingual real-time language/intent/sentiment analysis frameworks conversational AI agents and next-generation agent-assist solutions.
Define and drive experimentation standards statistically robust offline/online evaluations and model governance for compliance fairness and explainability.
Bridge cutting-edge research and production collaborating with Engineering to build systems that scale globally and meet real-world performance constraints.
Mentor guide and develop Senior Scientists and Engineers fostering a culture of scientific rigor creativity and technical excellence across the organization.
Represent Zendesk externallypublishing papers speaking at conferences and engaging with the wider ML/AI community.
Advise leadership on ML/AI technology strategy and assess emerging industry trends for integration into Zendesk solutions.
Mentor junior scientists and help grow the ML research culture.
Key challenges / use cases
How do we enrich customer service conversations with accurate language detection intent recognition and real-time sentiment analysis to enable proactive customer engagement and optimal routing
How can we automate all customer service interactions as much as possible from process automation to agent assistance and chatbots with a knowledge base
How do we optimize routing at scalematching tickets or chats to the most appropriate agent/team in real-time across multiple languages and regions
How do we automate large-scale A/B testing and model evaluation (online and offline) to continually iterate and improve ML-driven triage and agent-assist tools
What novel approaches or architectures (e.g. retrieval-augmented generation few-shot/fine-tuning strategies) can extend our conversational AI platforms to unlock new customer support use cases and modalities
How do we efficiently operationalize monitor and update large-scale (LLM/ML) models in dynamic high-throughput production settings ensuring model health drift detection and continuous learning
How do we combine signals from conversation context customer history and external data to improve prediction and decision accuracy across our ML services
What are the emerging advancements in ML/AI research (e.g. large language models efficient adaptation re-ranking retrieval or explainable AI) that should be incorporated into Zendesks customer experience ecosystem
How can we bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and impactful product features rapidly validating ideas in production and quantifying their real-world business value
And many more!
What you bring to the role
MSc degree (PhD preferred) in computer science electrical engineering math or related areas.
Substantial track record of impactful research and deployment of ML/AI solutions at scalepreferably in NLP LLMs or information retrieval.
Proven technical and research leadership across projects/teams; ability to define research vision and influence organizational direction.
Deep expertise in experimental design statistical analysis and ML science best practices.
Strong coding skills in Python; experience with ML frameworks (preferably PyTorch).
Experience with large-scale experimentation (e.g. A/B testing) data analysis and performance tracking.
Outstanding mentorship and communication skillsable to both advance scientific discourse and influence engineering/product execution.
Be pragmatic and results oriented.
Recognized contributions to the scientific community (publications open source talks) a strong plus.
What our tech stack looks like
Our code is written in Python and Ruby.
Our servers live in AWS.
Our machine learning models rely on PyTorch.
Our ML pipelines use AWS Batch and MetaFlow.
Our data is stored in S3 RDS MySQL Redis ElasticSearch Snowflake and Aurora.
Our services are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker and use Kafka for stream-processing.
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.
Required Experience:
Staff IC
Employment Type
Full-Time
