Senior Software Engineer - AI Copilot (Backend)

Job Description

Job Summary
At Zendesk, our focus is helping our customers build great relationships with their customers. Founded by three Danish entrepreneurs, Zendesk has experienced remarkable success and growth while maintaining a fun, positive, and down-to-earth culture.
We are looking for a Senior Software 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. You will be a key contributor delivering AI-powered product features at Zendesk scale, taking ownership of significant pieces of work from design through to production.
We ship to learn: our philosophy is to deliver early, deliver often, and iterate based on real-world customer feedback.

What you'll be doing

• Own and deliver end-to-end product features — from technical design through implementation, testing, release, and iteration.
• Work closely with ML Scientists and ML Engineers to integrate ML-powered capabilities into the product as reliable, user-facing features.
• Contribute to technical design discussions and architecture decisions within your team, with growing influence across teams.
• Build and maintain scalable backend services, APIs, and integrations that support AI-powered product experiences.
• Collaborate with Product Management, Design, and other engineering teams to turn product requirements into well-scoped technical work.
• Improve the reliability, performance, and maintainability of the systems you work on — proactively identifying and addressing technical debt.
• Mentor more junior engineers through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing.

What you bring to the role
Required

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale, Internet-facing applications.
• Fluent in Ruby; working proficiency in Python is a big plus.
• Solid experience with distributed systems, RESTful APIs, and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Experience with containerised deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices.
• A track record of owning features end-to-end and delivering them to production with high quality.
• Ability to work with uncertainty and the flexibility to pivot with changing priorities.
• Comfort working in a team alongside ML engineers and scientists — you don't need to be an ML expert, but you should be curious and able to collaborate effectively across disciplines.
• Strong collaboration skills and a genuine desire to help the team succeed.

Preferred

• Experience with SQL and data infrastructure (Snowflake, dbt) — understanding data pipelines and transformations is valuable in our environment.
• Exposure to LLM integration patterns: prompt engineering, evaluation, monitoring, or multi-provider setups.
• Familiarity with ML pipeline tooling (e.g., Metaflow) or ML frameworks.
• Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka).
• Experience with iterative, metrics-driven product development (A/B testing, feature flags, incremental rollouts).

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

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 peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.