Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Zendesk’s people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. Our products help more than 145,000 global brands (AirBnb, Uber, JetBrains, Slack, among others) make their billions of customers happy, every day.

Our team is dedicated to providing a robust full-text search experience for our customers across multiple channels; including help centers and RAG (retrieval-augmented-generation) bots. In collaboration with ML engineers and scientists, we deliver high-quality AI products leveraging the latest tools and techniques, and serve them at a scale that most companies can only dream of. We’re passionate about empowering end-users to find what they’re looking for, and helping our customers get the most out of their knowledge base.

We’re looking for a Senior Engineer to join our team and play a key role in leveling up the search platform powering Zendesk! 

What you’ll be doing

• Delivering AI-powered capabilities to our customers at Zendesk scale

• Working closely with Product Management, ML Scientists and ML Engineers to define feature scope and implementation strategies

• Mentoring junior team members, as well as pairing with more experienced colleagues to foster mutual learning

• Supporting our deployed services to ensure a high level of stability and reliability

• Writing clean and maintainable code to meet the team’s delivery commitments

• Contributing to discussions regarding technical design and best practices

• Here some of the challenges you will be working on:

  • How can we enhance the ranking of search results?

  • How can we reduce the occurrence of zero search results?

  • How do we best provide a retrieval platform across multiple channels?

  • How can we optimize our indexing pipeline for speed and cost-efficiency?

  • And many more

What you bring to the role

• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python or Ruby, along with experience in relevant testing frameworks

• Experience in designing, implementing, and optimizing search solutions, ideally with a focus on Elasticsearch

• Solid understanding of architecture and software design patterns for server-side and web applications

• Collaborative and growth mindset, with a commitment to ongoing learning and development

• Self-managed, dedicated approach with the ability to work independently

• Experience building scalable and stable software applications

• Ability to formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze results to inform engineering decisions

• Experience with managing and deploying cloud services with AWS

• Experience with event-driven, distributed architecture using Kafka

Tech Stack

• Our codebase is primarily written in Ruby and Python

• Data is stored in RDS MySQL, Redis, S3, ElasticSearch, Kafka, and Athena

• Our platform is built on AWS

• Services are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker, with Kafka for stream processing

• Infrastructure health is monitored using Datadog and Sentry

What we offer

• Team of passionate people who love what they do!

• Exciting opportunity to work on RAG (retrieval-augmented-generation) , a rapidly evolving field in AI and natural language processing

• Ownership of the product features at scale, making a significant impact for millions of customers

• Opportunity to learn and grow!

• Possibility to specialise in areas such as security, performance, and reliability

...and everything you need to be effective and maintain work-life balance

• Flexible working hours

• Professional development funds

• Comfortable office and a hybrid-friendly environment

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 is to be determined by the hiring manager.

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.

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.