Job Description: Zendesk is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our AI Copilot organization. The AI Copilot product brings AI directly into the hands of customer service agents and administrators. Job Responsibilities Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, setting architectural direction and raising the bar for engineering quality and delivery practices. Work closely with ML Scientists and ML Engineers to bring ML‐powered capabilities into production as polished product features that customers use daily. Own the design and architecture of complex, cross‐cutting systems — driving decisions from proposal through to production and iterating based on real usage. Identify and drive high‐impact technical initiatives: performance, scalability, cost optimisation, and developer productivity. Collaborate with Product Management, Design, and engineering leadership to shape the technical roadmap and ensure engineering investments align with product and business goals. Mentor and elevate engineers across the organisation through code review, design reviews, pairing, and setting strong technical standards. Act as a bridge between product engineering and ML/science, making pragmatic trade‐offs that get features shipped. Required Qualifications 10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating large‐scale, Internet‐facing applications with a demonstrated ability to set technical direction across teams. Fluent in Ruby; working proficiency in Python is a big plus. Strong experience with distributed systems, RESTful APIs, event‐driven architectures (e.g., Kafka), and cloud infrastructure (AWS). Deep experience with containerised deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices. Proven ability to lead cross‐team technical initiatives from conception to delivery. Comfort working alongside ML engineers and scientists, understanding ML workflows, model serving, LLM integration patterns, and building reliable product experiences on top of ML capabilities. Strong experience with SQL and data infrastructure, with reasoning about data pipelines, query performance, and analytics. Ability to navigate ambiguity, make sound trade‐offs, and provide direction when priorities shift. Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across an organisation. Preferred Qualifications Experience with Snowflake and dbt for data transformations and analytics. Hands‐on experience integrating LLMs into production systems: prompt engineering, evaluation, monitoring, cost management, and multi‐provider strategies. Familiarity with ML pipeline tooling (e.g., Metaflow) and ML frameworks. Experience with iterative, metrics‐driven product development (A/B testing, feature flags, incremental rollouts). Background in building AI/ML‐powered products where the ML capability is embedded in a broader product experience. Tech Stack Code written in Ruby and Python. Servers hosted on AWS. ML pipelines use Metaflow. Data stored in S3, RDS MySQL, and Snowflake (with dbt for transformations). Services and models deployed to Kubernetes using Docker. Heavy usage of LLM technology from multiple providers. Equal Opportunity Employer & EEO Statement 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr