{"id":3996554,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend","title":"Staff Software Engineer - AI Copilot (Backend)","company":{"id":369,"name":"Zendesk","domain":"zendesk.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zendesk","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":29,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.552,"repost_share":0.069,"time_to_fill_p50_days":32,"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Lisbon, Portugal","Portugal"],"countries":["PT"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Metaflow","optional":false},{"name":"MLFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Ruby","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":true},{"name":"MySQL","optional":true},{"name":"Vercel AI SDK","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-09","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T01:25:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Job Description\nJob Summary\nAt 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.\nWe 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. You will be a technical leader driving the architecture and delivery of our conversational AI backend - the system that enables admins to configure and optimize Zendesk through natural language.\nWe ship to learn: our philosophy is to deliver early, deliver often, and iterate based on real-world customer feedback.\nWhat you'll be doing\nDrive the technical vision and architecture for the Admin Copilot Conversational backend - LLM orchestration, intent detection, context retrieval, and tool execution.\nOwn end-to-end delivery of complex, cross-cutting features - from technical design through implementation, release, and production operation.\nBe a hands-on technical leader: set engineering standards, make key architecture decisions, and ensure the team builds reliable, scalable systems.\nCollaborate closely with ML Scientists, Product Management, Design, and partner engineering teams to shape the product roadmap from a technical perspective.\nInfluence technical direction beyond your team - contribute to architecture decisions across the Copilot organisation and adjacent teams.\nDesign and improve evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and safety mechanisms for LLM-powered features in production.\nMentor and grow engineers on the team through technical guidance, code review, and pairing. Raise the bar for engineering quality.\nIdentify and address systemic technical risks, performance bottlenecks, and reliability gaps before they become customer-facing problems.\nWhat you bring to the role\nRequired\n8+ years of experience in software engineering, with demonstrated technical leadership in backend systems.\nStrong experience designing and building distributed systems at scale - APIs, service architectures, and data pipelines.\nExperience with LLM integration in production systems - orchestration, prompt engineering, evaluation, guardrails, or multi-provider setups.\nFluent in at least one backend language (Ruby, Python, Go, or similar); working proficiency across multiple languages.\nDeep understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS), containerised deployments (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD practices.\nA track record of driving technical direction for a team or project - architecture decisions, technical roadmaps, and cross-team alignment.\nAbility to operate effectively with ambiguity - you can break down complex problems, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and move fast without sacrificing quality.\nStrong collaboration and communication skills - you influence through technical credibility and clear articulation of tradeoffs, not authority.\n Preferred\nExperience building conversational AI or chat-based systems (intent detection, context management, tool use).\nExperience with ML infrastructure: model serving, inference pipelines, or evaluation frameworks.\nFamiliarity with ML pipeline tooling (e.g., Metaflow) and experiment tracking (e.g., MLflow).\nExperience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka).\nExperience with SQL and data infrastructure (Snowflake, dbt).\nExperience mentoring or technically leading a team of 3+ engineers.\n Tech Stack\nOur code is written in Ruby and Python\nOur servers live in AWS\nOur ML pipelines use Metaflow\nOur data is stored in S3, RDS MySQL, and Snowflake (with dbt for transformations)\nOur services and models are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker\nHeavy usage of LLM technology from multiple providers via our LLM Proxy\nOur conversational backend uses the Vercel AI SDK for LLM orchestration\nThe intelligent heart of customer experience\nZendesk 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.\nZendesk 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.\nAs 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.\nZendesk 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.\nZendesk 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  with your specific accommodation request.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5852,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","CRM Software","Customer Support & Help Desk Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-10T01:25:25Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":32,"reasons":["conf:3","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-10T04:53:24Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-10T04:53:24Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11353,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-11T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":369},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=369"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fzendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fzendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/zendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzendesk-staff-software-engineer-ai-copilot-backend"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3996554}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"zendesk.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3996554},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}