# Senior AI Data Engineer

**Company**: Zendesk
**Location**: Dublin
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://zendesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/zendesk/job/Dublin-Ireland/Senior-AI-Data-Engineer_R35161?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_931bb701-c8f

## Description

Zendesk's mission is to make Customer Experience better - for every brand, every customer, every day.

The Zendesk Analytics Prototyping (ZAP) team designs and ships fine-grained, contextually rich datasets that power Zendesk's customer-facing analytics application.

We're looking for a Senior AI Data Engineer to join our team, with strong data engineering experience and a keen interest in applying AI-related tools and practices in practical ways.

**What you'll be doing:**

- Develop and maintain ELT pipelines, ensuring data reliability and scalability for business reporting and analytics use cases.

- Build and optimize SQL-based data models using dbt and other ETL tools.

- Support ZAP's progress toward a more AI-enabled operating model, using emerging technologies to help improve team productivity.

- Identify and implement improvements in data delivery, processing performance, and system efficiency.

- Collaborate with team members to define requirements and translate them into scalable data models and pipelines.

- Contribute to the team's technical vision and bring innovative solutions to enhance data systems.

**What you bring to the role**

**Basic Qualifications:**

- 5+ years of data engineering experience building, maintaining and working with data pipelines & ETL processes in big data environments.

- Extensive experience with SQL, ideally in the context of data modeling and analysis.

- Hands-on production experience with dbt, and proven knowledge in modern and classic Data Modeling - Kimball, Inmon, etc.

- Programming skills in Python or a similar language, with an emphasis on data transformation and automation.

- Experience with cloud columnar databases (Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake), query authoring (SQL) as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases.

- Proven experience in performance testing, capacity planning, and cost optimization for large-scale, complex data pipelines and systems.

- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

**Preferred Qualifications:**

- Experience building or operating an AI-augmented engineering practice - agentic IDE workflows (Cursor, Claude Code), prompt/skill engineering, eval design, and the discipline of treating AI artefacts as production code.

- SnowPro Core certification or equivalent hands-on expertise.

- Hands-on production experience with Apache Spark (Spark SQL / PySpark).

- Familiarity with Lean/6 Sigma principles and an understanding of CRM analytics.

**Our Data Stack:** ELT: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Kafka BI: Zendesk proprietary application, Looker Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions

## Skills

### Required
- SQL
- dbt
- Python
- data engineering
- cloud columnar databases
- performance testing
- capacity planning
- cost optimization

### Nice to have
- AI-augmented engineering practice
- SnowPro Core certification
- Apache Spark
- Lean/6 Sigma principles
- CRM analytics

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Source: [Apply at zendesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com](https://zendesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/zendesk/job/Dublin-Ireland/Senior-AI-Data-Engineer_R35161?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)