Hybrid Senior Machine Learning Engineer, AI/ML Infrastructure – GenAI Platforms

at Zendesk

• Job title: Senior Machine Learning Engineer, AI/ML Infrastructure – GenAI Platforms
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Distributed Systems, Docker, Google Cloud Platform, Java, Kubernetes, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Lisbon, Portugal

About the role

• Lead ML Engineer developing GenAI infrastructure at Zendesk. Building robust, production-grade ML platforms and collaborating with various teams on AI-driven products.

Responsibilities

• Help build benchmarking frameworks for LLMs, including A/B, Offline Evals testing capabilities to assess quality, latency, and cost trade-offs.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of Zendesk’s LLM Proxy to enable safe, observable, and cost-optimized access to multiple foundation models.
• Partner with applied ML, product, and platform teams to ensure GenAI infrastructure meets the needs of diverse product use cases.
• Implement best practices for monitoring, observability, rate-limiting, and cost attribution for LLM services.
• Establish strong engineering practices around observability, reliability, security, and cost monitoring.
• Work on orchestration tooling to enable multi-step, tool-using AI agents that integrate with Zendesk’s products.

Requirements

• 5+ years in developing and deploying ML systems in production, with hands-on experience in scaling infrastructure and ensuring service reliability.
• Familiarity with core ML infrastructure components such as model registries, feature stores, orchestration tools, and inference serving systems.
• Understanding of LLM systems, GenAI applications, or ML/AI platform components such as vector databases, serving layers, and orchestration tools.
• Experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure; Kubernetes; Docker; and distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one server-side language (Python, Java, Scala, Golang, or Ruby) and solid grounding in testing and CI/CD workflows.
• Understanding of architecture principles and patterns for building scalable, resilient backend services.
• Experience taking projects from design to production deployment, with a focus on maintainability and performance.
• Preferred Qualifications: Experience with AI technologies in automating processes and developing agentic solutions and frameworks.
• Experience building tools that improve developer productivity and platform adoption across multiple teams.

Benefits

• Full ownership of the projects you work on.
• Exciting projects, ability to implement your own ideas and improvements.
• Opportunity to learn and grow.
• 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.