Job Description

Staff Machine Learning Engineer AI Agent

Location: San Francisco

Join us at Zendesk where were on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. Were accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI automation and intelligent customer experiences because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection.

Were seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help build the AI Agent experiences that resolve customer issues with accuracy speed and trust. Your work will shape how AI agents reason through customer requests use tools and business context take action across systems and collaborate with human agents when needed.

What youll be doing

• Lead the design and development of AI Agent capabilities that can understand customer intent follow conversation context take reliable actions and deliver helpful resolutions.

• Build agentic workflows that connect reasoning retrieval tool use policy guidance and human handoff into seamless customer support experiences.

• Partner with product design engineering and research teams to turn customer problems into polished AI-powered product features.

• Improve the quality reliability and safety of AI Agent behavior through evaluation frameworks feedback loops observability and iterative experimentation.

• Design systems that enable AI Agents to use Zendesk data knowledge business rules and third-party integrations effectively and securely.

• Drive technical direction across teams helping define patterns for scalable agent architecture orchestration testing and production readiness.

• Identify opportunities to improve resolution rates reduce friction for customers and agents and make AI-driven support feel natural trustworthy and useful.

• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for technical execution product thinking and responsible AI development.

What you bring to the role

• Deep experience building production AI automation or intelligent product experiences that solve real customer problems.

• Strong product engineering mindset you care about the end-to-end user experience not just the underlying model or system.

• Experience designing agentic systems conversational AI workflow automation retrieval-augmented experiences or tool-using AI applications.

• Ability to make complex AI systems reliable in production through evaluation monitoring debugging and continuous improvement.

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to lead ambiguous cross-functional initiatives from concept to launch.

• Comfort working across backend systems product surfaces data pipelines APIs and AI infrastructure.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills with the ability to influence technical strategy across teams.

Basic qualifications

• 6 years building production software AI-powered products or large-scale intelligent systems.

• Experience leading technical design and execution for complex product or platform initiatives.

• Hands-on experience with LLM-based applications conversational systems agent orchestration retrieval systems or AI workflow automation.

• Strong programming skills in Python or equivalent backend languages.

• Experience with production-quality systems including APIs distributed services observability testing and reliability practices.

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation prompt and policy management safety guardrails tool calling and feedback-driven improvement loops.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers or setting technical direction across multiple teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building AI agents copilots virtual assistants or automated support products in production.

• Experience with customer service CRM ticketing knowledge management or enterprise workflow products.

• Background designing systems that combine structured business data unstructured knowledge and real-time user context.

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 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.