Overview
Join to apply for the Senior AI Agent Engineer role at Zendesk.
The Agentic Tribe is revolutionizing the chatbot and voice assistance landscape with Gen3, a cutting‑edge AI Agent system pushing the boundaries of conversational AI. Gen3 is goal‑oriented, dynamic, and truly conversational—capable of reasoning, planning, and adapting to user needs in real time. Leveraging a multi‑agent architecture and advanced language models, Gen3 delivers personalized, engaging user experiences, moving beyond scripted interactions to handle complex tasks and off‑script inquiries with ease.
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, focusing on designing, developing, and deploying intelligent, autonomous agents that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline operations. You’ll 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.
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), analysing 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.
* Troubleshoot, debug and optimise 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.
Core Technical Competencies
* LLM‑Oriented System Design: Designing multi‑step, tool‑using agents (LangChain, Autogen), deep understanding of prompt engineering, context management and LLM behaviour quirks (hallucinations, determinism, temperature effects). Implement 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 optimisation: 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.
Bonus Points (Preferred Qualifications)
* Ph.D / Masters in a relevant field (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 (PEFT, LoRA).
The Interview Process
* Initial Call with Talent Team – 15 minutes
* Interview with one member of the Hiring Team – 45 minutes
* Take‑home technical challenge
* Technical interview with two developers – 1 hour
* Final interview with CTO or Engineering Manager/Director – 45 minutes
About Zendesk
Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organisations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement, giving organisations flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation and scale with 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.
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 will be determined by the hiring manager.
EEO Statement
Zendesk is an equal‑opportunity employer and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion. Individuals seeking employment at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, colour, 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.
Job Details
* Seniority level: Mid‑Senior level
* Employment type: Full‑time
* Job function: Engineering and Information Technology
* Industry: Software Development
* Location: London, England, United Kingdom
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