Zendesk is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to level up its full-text search platform and AI-powered products, including retrieval-augmented-generation bots, used by over 145,000 global brands. The role involves delivering AI capabilities at scale with the latest LLM tech, collaborating with Product Management, ML scientists, and engineers to define features, mentoring juniors, maintaining service stability, writing clean code, and contributing to technical design, while tackling challenges like expanding RAG use cases, hybrid search, ranking, indexing speed/cost, and multi-channel retrieval. Basic qualifications include proficiency in Python or Ruby, solid software architecture knowledge, a collaborative growth mindset, ability to work independently, experience building scalable applications, and the ability to form hypotheses and analyze experiments. Preferred qualifications include designing and optimizing ML-based search (Elasticsearch), AWS cloud experience, and event-driven architectures using Kafka. The tech stack features Python/Ruby, PyTorch, AWS, data stores such as MySQL, Redis, S3, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and Snowflake, with Kubernetes and Docker for deployment and Datadog/Sentry for monitoring, and Zendesk offers growth opportunities, ownership at scale, specialization options, a hybrid work policy, and a commitment to equal opportunity and inclusion with accommodations for applicants.
