Senior AI Data Engineer - ELT & AI-Driven Analytics

Zendesk; Kraków; Hybrid; PLN 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Zendesk's Analytics Prototyping (ZAP) team in Kraków is seeking a Senior AI Data Engineer to design and ship granular data assets powering Zendesk’s customer‑facing analytics and internal decision support. You will work across SQL, dbt models and datasets to build scalable ELT pipelines and AI-enabled data capabilities.

The role emphasizes collaboration, performance optimization, and applying AI tools in production, with a stack including Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Spark, and cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience building, maintaining and working with data pipelines & ETL processes in big data environments.
• Extensive experience with SQL, ideally in the context of data modeling and analysis.
• Hands-on production experience with dbt, and proven knowledge in modern and classic Data Modeling – Kimball, Inmon, etc.
• Programming skills in Python or a similar language, with an emphasis on data transformation and automation.
• Experience with cloud columnar databases (Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake), query authoring (SQL) as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases.
• Proven experience in performance testing, capacity planning, and cost optimization for large-scale, complex data pipelines and systems. This includes identifying bottlenecks, ensuring scalability, and minimizing operational costs in cloud-based data environments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain ELT pipelines, ensuring data reliability and scalability for business reporting and analytics use cases.
• Build and optimize SQL-based data models using dbt and other ETL tools.
• Support ZAP’s progress toward a more AI-enabled operating model, using emerging technologies to help improve team productivity.
• Identify and implement improvements in data delivery, processing performance, and system efficiency.
• Collaborate with team members to define requirements and translate them into scalable data models and pipelines.
• Contribute to the team’s technical vision and bring innovative solutions to enhance data systems.

Skills

5+ years data engineering

SQL expertise

dbt data modeling

Python data transformation

Cloud data warehouses

Performance optimization

Communication skills

Tools

dbt

Snowflake

Airflow

Kafka

Spark (PySpark)

BigQuery

Redshift

Job description

Zendesk's Analytics Prototyping (ZAP) team in Kraków is seeking a Senior AI Data Engineer to design and ship granular data assets powering Zendesk’s customer‑facing analytics and internal decision support. You will work across SQL, dbt models and datasets to build scalable ELT pipelines and AI-enabled data capabilities.

The role emphasizes collaboration, performance optimization, and applying AI tools in production, with a stack including Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Spark, and cloud platforms.