Zendesk is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to serve as the embedded ML expert for Routing & Presence, owning the ML surface end-to-end from feature engineering and model design through experimentation, production serving, monitoring, and continuous learning, and guiding the evolution to an agentic routing engine. You’ll work closely with backend engineers, product managers, and the central ML platform team, setting the technical direction for how ML shapes routing over the next several years. Responsibilities include owning the models and algorithms at the heart of Routing & Presence, planning ML work with observability and iterability from the start, proposing and evaluating alternatives, designing experimentation frameworks (offline and online) with customer-facing metrics, and coordinating data sources for dynamic routing decisions with explainability and guardrails. The ideal candidate will apply classical ML with a clear understanding of why an approach works, work hands-on with generative AI and LLMs, design end-to-end experiments, ship ML in production, estimate project effort, communicate designs clearly, mentor teammates, and plan 18+ months ahead. The role sits within Zendesk’s collaborative, inclusive culture and hybrid work model, with a tech stack including Java, Scala, Python, Kubernetes, and supportive ML platform tooling, underpinned by strong privacy, diversity, and equal-opportunity commitments.
