Staff Backend AI Copilot Lead (Hybrid/Remote)

Zendesk, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Zendesk, Inc. is seeking a staff backend engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of a conversational AI copilot for customer service admins. You will guide the path from design to production, balancing hands-on engineering with technical direction across teams.

Required eight+ years in backend systems, strong distributed design, and experience with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. Hybrid work setup offers collaboration both in-office and remote flexibility.

Qualifications

• Eight+ years in software engineering with backend leadership.
• Experience designing distributed systems at scale.
• Production work with large language models and orchestration.
• Fluent in Ruby, Python, or Go; able to work with additional languages.
• Strong AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD knowledge.
• Clear communication and ability to align multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for conversational backend capabilities.
• Own complex features from design to production support.
• Establish engineering standards and scalable architectures.
• Collaborate with ML, product, design, and engineering partners.
• Develop evaluation, safeguards, and safety mechanisms for models.
• Mentor engineers and address systemic risks and reliability gaps.

Skills

Backend languages: Ruby, Python, Go

Distributed systems design

API design & data pipelines

LLM integration & orchestration

AWS cloud & CI/CD pipelines

Docker & Kubernetes

Software leadership & mentoring

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Zendesk, Inc. is seeking a staff backend engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of a conversational AI copilot for customer service admins. You will guide the path from design to production, balancing hands-on engineering with technical direction across teams.

Required eight+ years in backend systems, strong distributed design, and experience with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. Hybrid work setup offers collaboration both in-office and remote flexibility.