Staff Ai Agent Engineer (machine Learning), Portugal

Zendesk Portugal, Portalegre, PT

Publicado 2025-11-27

Descrição

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 highly experienced and influential AI Agent Engineer to join our team. In this role, you'll be dedicated to driving innovation and technical leadership at the forefront of AI technology, with a focus on designing, developing, and deploying intelligent, autonomous agents that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline operations. You'll shape the cognitive architecture for our AI-powered applications, creating systems that can reason, plan, and execute complex, multi-step tasks, and guiding other engineers. You'll own critical, cross-cutting technical initiatives that impact multiple teams, serve as a go-to expert for complex problems, and proactively engage with a broad range of stakeholders to influence strategy and execution.



What You'll Do (Responsibilities):

Architect, design, and lead the development of robust, stateful, and scalable AI agents using Python and modern agentic frameworks (e.g., Lang Chain, Llama Index), setting technical direction and best practices for engineering teams.

Strategize and oversee the integration of AI agent solutions with existing enterprise systems, databases, and third-party APIs to create seamless, end-to-end workflows across the product, identifying and mitigating architectural risks .

Evaluate and select appropriate foundation models and services from third-party providers (e.g., Open AI, Anthropic, Google), analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and cost-effectiveness for specific use cases.

Own and drive the entire lifecycle of AI Agent deployment, from concept to production and beyond for large, ambiguous, or highly complex initiatives—collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including product leadership, ML scientists to understand strategic needs and deliver highly effective agent solutions. 

Troubleshoot, debug, and optimize complex AI systems, ensuring exceptional performance, reliability, and scalability in production environments, and mentoring other engineers in advanced problem-solving techniques.

Define, establish, and continuously improve platforms and methodologies for evaluating AI agent performance, setting key metrics, driving iterative improvements across the organization, and influencing industry best practices.

Establish and enforce best practices for documentation of development processes, architectural decisions, code, and research findings to ensure comprehensive knowledge sharing and maintainability across the team and wider engineering organization.

Mentor and guide more junior and mid-level developers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning, and contributing to the growth and career development of others.


Core Technical Competencies:

Expert in LLM-Oriented System Design: Architecting and designing complex multi-step, tool-using agents (e.g., Lang Chain, Autogen). Deep understanding of prompt engineering, context management, and LLM behavior quirks (e.g., hallucinations, determinism, temperature effects). Ability to implement advanced reasoning patterns like Chain-of-Thought and multi-agent communication.

Mastery of Tool Integration & APIs: Designing and implementing secure and scalable integrations of agents with external tools, databases, and APIs (e.g., Open AI, Anthropic) in complex execution environments, often involving novel solutions or significant architectural considerations.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Designing, building, and optimizing highly performant and robust RAG pipelines with vector databases, chunking, and sophisticated hybrid search techniques

Leadership in Evaluation & Observability: Defining, implementing LLM evaluation frameworks and comprehensive monitoring for latency, accuracy, and tool usage across production systems, influencing the observability strategy.

Safety & Reliability: Designing and implementing state-of-the-art defenses against prompt injection and robust guardrails (e.g., Rebuff, Guardrails AI) and complex fallback strategies.

Performance Optimization: Deep expertise in managing LLM token budgets and latency through smart model routing, caching (e.g., Redis), and other advanced optimization techniques, identifying and addressing systemic performance bottlenecks.

Planning & Reasoning: Designing and implementing cutting-edge agents with long-term memory and highly complex planning capabilities (e.g., Re Act, Tree-of-Thought)

Programming & Tooling: Expert in Python, Fast API, and LLM SDKs; extensive experience and strategic contributions with cloud deployment (AWS/GCP/Azure) and CI/CD for complex AI applications.


Bonus Points (Preferred Qualifications)

Ph. D / Masters in a relevant field (e.g., Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, NLP).

Comprehensive understanding of foundational ML concepts (attention, embeddings, transfer learning) 

Experience adapting academic research into production-ready code.

Familiarity with fine-tuning techniques (e.g., PEFT, Lo RA).


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: Senior Director and Engineering Manager - 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 to learn more about how we engage with, and provide support to, our local communities.  



Localização

Portugal
Portalegre
Portugal
Anúncio:



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Ocupação Staff ai agent engineer (machine learning)
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Zendesk
Zendesk
157 empregos ativos
Registrado 2023-06-11
Portugal

Zendesk provides a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. With more than 60,000 customer accounts, Zendesk is used by organizations in 140 countries to provide support in more than 40 languages. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.
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