Zendesk is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer I

Zendesk is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the next wave of GenAI infrastructure development. You'll build and operate benchmarking, evaluation, and inference systems that ensure our AI-driven customer support experiences are reliable, safe, and cost-effective. This role is based in our Pune, India office.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain benchmarking frameworks for LLMs (A/B tests, offline and end-to-end evaluation pipelines) to measure quality, latency, and cost trade-offs.
• Design, develop, and operate LLM Proxy functionality: routing, safety filters, caching, rate limiting, and cost attribution across vendors.
• Implement monitoring, observability, and alerting for LLM services (latency, error rates, hallucination signals, cost per call).
• Lead the design and automation of evaluation suites and gold-standard datasets for ticket replies, summaries, intent detection, and recommendations.
• Collaborate with applied ML, product, and platform teams to translate evaluation findings into model improvements, release criteria, and mitigation strategies.
• Build orchestration tooling for multi-step agentic workflows and integrations that safely interact with external tools and Zendesk products.
• Establish engineering best practices around security, reliability, testing, CI/CD, and performance tuning for ML services.
• Mentor engineers, help define roadmap priorities, and drive cross-team initiatives that increase platform adoption and developer productivity.

What We're Looking For

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years industry experience delivering production ML systems or backend services.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with containerized deployments and cloud infrastructure.
• Proven experience designing and running model evaluation, monitoring, or A/B testing for ML services.
• 5+ years building and running ML systems or backend platforms in production, with strong ownership from design to deployment.
• Hands-on experience with LLM systems, inference-serving patterns, or GenAI application infrastructure (prompting, caching, vendor routing).
• Strong backend engineering skills (Python or another server-side language), familiarity with distributed systems, and production CI/CD practices.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and monitoring/observability tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to design evaluation pipelines, build gold-standard datasets, or run rigorous A/B and offline evaluations.
• Clear communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs into product decisions and measurable outcomes.
• Curious, collaborative, and committed to building reliable, safe, and cost-effective GenAI infrastructure.

Nice to Have

• Experience with LLM vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Llama) and vector databases.
• Background in building agentic orchestration or tool-using AI systems.
• Prior experience implementing cost attribution, vendor routing, or request-level caching for LLMs.
• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) or demonstrated research contributions in ML/NLP.

Technical Stack

• Languages: Python
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, GCP, Azure

Team & Environment

You will be part of the AI/ML Platform team, collaborating across applied ML, product, and platform engineering to scale Zendesk's GenAI capabilities.

Work Mode

This is a hybrid position located in Pune, India.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer.