Introduction

Job Description

The Agentic Tribe is revolutionizing the chatbot and voice assistance landscape with Gen3, a cutting-edge AI Agent system that's pushing the boundaries of conversational AI. Gen3 is not your typical chatbot; it's a goal-oriented, dynamic, and truly conversational system capable of reasoning, planning, and adapting to user needs in real-time. By leveraging a multi-agent architecture and advanced language models, Gen3 delivers personalized and engaging user experiences, moving beyond scripted interactions to handle complex tasks and "off-script" inquiries with ease.

About Zendesk

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement. They give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth.

More than 100,000 paid customer accounts in over 150 countries and territories use Zendesk products. Based in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.

Interested in knowing what we do in the community? Check out the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation to learn more about how we engage with, and provide support to, our local communities.

Your tasks

About the Role:

We are seeking a passionate and experienced AI Agent Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will be dedicated to innovating at the forefront of AI technology, with a focus on designing, developing, and deploying intelligent, autonomous agents that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline operations. You will be a key player in building the cognitive architecture for our AI-powered applications, creating systems that can reason, plan, and execute complex, multi-step tasks. You’ll effectively communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including those outside your immediate team.

What You'll Do (Responsibilities):

• Design and develop robust, stateful, and scalable AI agents using Python and modern agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Integrate AI agent solutions with existing enterprise systems, databases, and third-party APIs to create seamless, end-to-end workflows.
• Evaluate and select appropriate foundation models and services from third-party providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and cost-effectiveness for specific use cases.
• Drive the entire lifecycle of AI Agent deployment—Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, ML scientists, and software engineers, to understand user needs and deliver effective, high-impact agent solutions.
• Troubleshoot, debug, and optimize complex AI systems to ensure optimal performance, reliability, and scalability in production environments.
• Establish and improve platforms for evaluating AI agent performance, defining key metrics to measure success and guide iteration.
• Document development processes, architectural decisions, code, and research findings to ensure knowledge sharing and maintainability across the team.
• LLM-Oriented System Design: Designing multi-step, tool-using agents (LangChain, Autogen). Deep understanding of prompt engineering, context management, and LLM behavior quirks (e.g., hallucinations, determinism, temperature effects). Implementing advanced reasoning patterns like Chain-of-Thought and multi-agent communication.
• Tool Integration & APIs: Integrating agents with external tools, databases, and APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) in secure execution environments.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Building and optimizing RAG pipelines with vector databases, advanced chunking, and hybrid search.
• Evaluation & Observability: Implementing LLM evaluation frameworks and monitoring for latency, accuracy, and tool usage.
• Safety & Reliability: Defending against prompt injection and implementing guardrails (Rebuff, Guardrails AI) and fallback strategies.
• Performance Optimization: Managing LLM token budgets and latency through smart model routing and caching (Redis).
• Planning & Reasoning: Designing agents with long-term memory and complex planning capabilities (ReAct, Tree-of-Thought).
• Programming & Tooling: Expert in Python, FastAPI, and LLM SDKs; experience with cloud deployment (AWS/GCP/Azure) and CI/CD for AI applications.

Your profile

Core Technical Competencies:

Bonus Points (Preferred Qualifications):

• Ph.D / Masters in a relevant field (e.g., Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, NLP).
• Deep understanding of foundational ML concepts (attention, embeddings, transfer learning).
• Experience adapting academic research into production-ready code.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning techniques (e.g., PEFT, LoRA).

We offer

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment 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, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes. Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where Zendesk may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk’s use of your personal information.

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Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.

The Interview Process:

We are excited to learn more about you, so we want to be transparent about what you can expect from our interview process:
1. Initial Call with Talent Team - 15 mins

2. Interview with one member of the Hiring Team - 45 minutes

3. Take-home technical challenge

4. A technical interview with two of our developers to talk more in-depth about your technical experience and answer any questions you might have - 1 hour

5. Final interview with 2 of the following: CTO or Engineering Manager/Director - 45 minutes