Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Platform

Job Description

Zendesk is building production AI systems that autonomously resolve customer service tickets across 100,000+ customer accounts. These systems plan multi-step resolutions, execute real actions through live APIs, and close tickets autonomously. We are now scaling beyond individual agent capabilities and investing in the platform foundation that powers reliable, secure, and measurable agentic services across the company.

Here, you won’t be building one-off tools or experiments. You’ll be helping create the platform layer that enables teams to build, operate, and scale agentic services across a massive enterprise footprint. Zendesk has the scale, data density, and production urgency to build platform systems that truly matter.

You’ll architect and build the core platform services that enable agentic systems at production scale. This includes designing and implementing the infrastructure, control planes, and developer platforms that support planning, execution, memory, evaluation, and multi-agent orchestration.

You’ll help define the primitives that product and AI teams build on top of, ensuring these systems are reliable, extensible, observable, and ready for enterprise use. This is ideal if you see agentic AI not as a model problem, but as a platform engineering and distributed systems problem.

What you’ll build

• Agentic Service Platform: You will lead the design of the shared platform services that underpin agentic workflows, including runtime orchestration, workflow execution, state management, retries, and fault recovery. You will help shape the abstractions that allow teams to build intelligent services without needing to re-implement the underlying infrastructure every time.

• Platform APIs and Internal Developer Experience: You will define and evolve the APIs, SDKs, and internal tooling that make the platform easy to adopt. You will partner closely with product, AI, and infrastructure teams to ensure the platform is usable, secure, and consistent across use cases.

• Memory, Context, and State Systems: You will design platform-level infrastructure for handling memory and context across concurrent sessions, with attention to consistency, isolation, performance, and cost.

• Reliability, Observability, and Evaluation: You will build and improve the platform’s observability, tracing, and evaluation systems so teams can understand system behaviour, detect regressions, and enforce quality gates in CI/CD.

• Governance and Safety: You will help design the guardrails, validation layers, and policy enforcement mechanisms required to operate agentic services safely in enterprise environments.

What you’ll bring

• Systems Thinker: You have 5+ years of backend experience (Java, Go, or Python). You understand that "Reliability" in an AI system isn't just about uptime; it's about Self-Correction and Recovery.

• Agent Architecture: With hands-on experience in agent architectures (planning, tool dispatch, memory, error recovery). In order to build a platform to support AI Agents, you need to understand how they work.

• Protocol Aware: You are excited by open standards like MCP and understand the complexity of API design, capability negotiation, and security/sandboxing for tool execution.

• Platform Builder:
  You enjoy creating foundational systems that multiple teams depend on. You think in terms of leverage, abstraction, reusability, and operational excellence.

Imagine being part of an AI-first company that's first in the world to introduce an Autonomous Service Workforce, one that actually walks the walk on the future of agentic services. That could be your future!

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.