# Staff Engineer

**Company**: Zendesk
**Location**: Remote, Portugal
**Work arrangement**: remote
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://zendesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/zendesk/job/Remote-Portugal/Staff-Software-Engineer---AI-Copilot--Backend-_R35849?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/job/staff-engineer-73976f03-e54/

## Description

At Zendesk, our focus is helping our customers build great relationships with their customers.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our AI Copilot organisation. AI Copilot is a multi-million ARR product that puts AI directly into the hands of customer service agents and administrators.

**Responsibilities**

- Drive the technical vision and architecture for the Admin Copilot Conversational backend , LLM orchestration, intent detection, context retrieval, and tool execution.

- Own end-to-end delivery of complex, cross-cutting features , from technical design through implementation, release, and production operation.

- Be a hands-on technical leader: set engineering standards, make key architecture decisions, and ensure the team builds reliable, scalable systems.

- Collaborate closely with ML Scientists, Product Management, Design, and partner engineering teams to shape the product roadmap from a technical perspective.

- Influence technical direction beyond your team , contribute to architecture decisions across the Copilot organisation and adjacent teams.

- Design and improve evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and safety mechanisms for LLM-powered features in production.

- Mentor and grow engineers on the team through technical guidance, code review, and pairing. Raise the bar for engineering quality.

- Identify and address systemic technical risks, performance bottlenecks, and reliability gaps before they become customer-facing problems.

**Requirements**

- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with demonstrated technical leadership in backend systems.

- Strong experience designing and building distributed systems at scale , APIs, service architectures, and data pipelines.

- Experience with LLM integration in production systems , orchestration, prompt engineering, evaluation, guardrails, or multi-provider setups.

- Fluent in at least one backend language (Ruby, Python, Go, or similar); working proficiency across multiple languages.

- Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS), containerised deployments (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD practices.

- A track record of driving technical direction for a team or project , architecture decisions, technical roadmaps, and cross-team alignment.

- Ability to operate effectively with ambiguity , you can break down complex problems, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and move fast without sacrificing quality.

- Strong collaboration and communication skills , you influence through technical credibility and clear articulation of tradeoffs, not authority.

**Preferred Qualifications**

- Experience building conversational AI or chat-based systems (intent detection, context management, tool use).

- Experience with ML infrastructure: model serving, inference pipelines, or evaluation frameworks.

- Familiarity with ML pipeline tooling (e.g., Metaflow) and experiment tracking (e.g., MLflow).

- Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka).

- Experience with SQL and data infrastructure (Snowflake, dbt).

- Experience mentoring or technically leading a team of 3+ engineers.

**Tech Stack**

- Our code is written in Ruby and Python

- Our servers live in AWS

- Our ML pipelines use Metaflow

- Our data is stored in S3, RDS MySQL, and Snowflake (with dbt for transformations)

- Our services and models are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker

- Heavy usage of LLM technology from multiple providers via our LLM Proxy

- Our conversational backend uses the Vercel AI SDK for LLM orchestration

For more fresh new jobs, check out [yubhub.co](https://yubhub.co/).

## Skills

### Required
- software engineering
- backend systems
- distributed systems
- LLM integration
- cloud infrastructure
- containerised deployments
- CI/CD practices
- technical leadership

### Nice to have
- conversational AI
- ML infrastructure
- Metaflow
- MLflow
- event-driven architectures
- Kafka
- SQL
- data infrastructure
- team leadership

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Source: [Apply at zendesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com](https://zendesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/zendesk/job/Remote-Portugal/Staff-Software-Engineer---AI-Copilot--Backend-_R35849?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)