AI Agent Engineer II

Job Description

The Agentic Tribe is revolutionizing the chatbot and voice assistance landscape with Gen3, a cutting-edge AI Agent system that's pushing the boundaries of conversational AI. Gen3 isn't your typical chatbot; it's a goal-oriented, dynamic, and truly conversational system capable of reasoning, planning, and adapting to user needs in real-time. By leveraging a multi-agent architecture and advanced language models, Gen3 delivers personalized and engaging user experiences, moving beyond scripted interactions to handle complex tasks and "off-script" inquiries with ease.

About the Role:

We're seeking a passionate AI Agent Engineer to join our team. In this role, you'll contribute to innovating at the forefront of AI technology, focusing on developing and refining intelligent, autonomous agents that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline operations. You'll be a key player in implementing and improving the cognitive architecture for our AI-powered applications, creating systems that can reason, plan, and execute complex, multi-step tasks. You'll primarily focus on defined project scopes and tasks, working under the guidance of more senior team members.

What You will do (Responsibilities):

• Contribute to the design and development of robust, stateful, and scalable AI agents using Python and modern agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex).

• Support the evaluation and selection of appropriate foundation models and services from third-party providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), contributing to the analysis of their strengths, weaknesses, and cost-effectiveness for specific use cases.

• Participate in the lifecycle of AI Agent deployment—collaborate closely with your immediate team, including product managers and software engineers, to understand user needs for the features you're building.

• Troubleshoot and debug AI systems to ensure optimal performance and reliability in production environments for assigned components.

• Document development processes, code, and findings to ensure knowledge sharing and maintainability within the team.

Core Technical Competencies:

• Familiarity with LLM-Oriented System Design: Understanding of multi-step, tool-using agents (e.g., LangChain, Autogen). Basic understanding of prompt engineering, context management, and LLM behavior (e.g., hallucinations).

• Tool Integration & APIs: Ability to integrate agents with external tools, databases, and APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) in secure execution environments.

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Understanding of RAG pipelines with vector databases.

• Evaluation & Observability: Basic understanding of LLM evaluation frameworks and monitoring for latency and accuracy.

• Safety & Reliability: Awareness of prompt injection and basic concepts of implementing guardrails and fallback strategies.

• Performance Optimization: Basic understanding of managing LLM token budgets and latency.

• Planning & Reasoning: Familiarity with concepts of agents with long-term memory and planning capabilities.

• Programming & Tooling: Proficient in Python (Fast API) and LLM SDKs; 

Bonus Points (Preferred Qualifications):

• Bachelor's or Master's in a relevant field (e.g., Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, NLP).

• Understanding of foundational ML concepts (attention, embeddings, transfer learning).

The Interview Process:

We are excited to learn more about you, so we want to be transparent about what you can expect from our interview process:

1. Initial Call with Talent Team - 15 mins

2. Interview with one member of the Hiring Team - 45 minutes

3. Take-home technical challenge

4. A technical interview with two of our developers to talk more in-depth about your technical experience and answer any questions you might have - 1 hour

5. Final interview with 2 of the following: CTO or Engineering Manager/Director - 45 minutes

About Zendesk

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement. They give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their 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.

Interested in knowing what we do in the community? Check out the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation to learn more about how we engage with, and provide support to, our local communities.  

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment 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, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes.  Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where Zendesk may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk’s use of your personal information.  

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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.