Job Description
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, AI Agent
Location: San Francisco
Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're 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.
We’re 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 you’ll 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.
The US annualized base salary range for this position is $246,000.00-$368,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.
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 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 peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.