Engineering Manager – Retrieval

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 multimedia search experience for our customers across multiple channels, including help centers, RAG (retrieval-augmented-generation) and AI Agents bots and CoPilot systems. 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.

As an Engineering Manager, you will lead all aspects of a cross-functional team responsible for the end-to-end delivery of Zendesk’s Retrieval platform. You will demonstrate your management expertise to steer the team while ensuring alignment with sound engineering practices. You will help ensure that search and ML-powered products built on your team’s systems are deployed and maintained efficiently at scale, with suitable cost and measurable quality. You will also champion the effective use of the latest-generation AI-assisted tools as part of the team’s day-to-day engineering practices.

You’ll work with Engineering, Product Management, ML Scientists, ML Engineers, Architects and other partners to ensure your team’s roadmap is aligned with company strategy. You’ll help the team deliver a reliable, scalable retrieval platform and ship architecturally sound software at a regular cadence.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead a team of experienced Engineers, offering direction and assistance at every stage of the lifecycle of the project.
• Collaborate with existing leadership to continually improve software delivery and service reliability.
• Maintain exceptional service levels on your team’s products and services.
• Lead the recruitment of new team members and facilitate a speedy, engaged interview and onboarding process.
• Have quality 1:1s with your team members focusing on their performance, growth and well-being.
• Create a diverse and inclusive working environment where people can thrive.

What you bring to the role

• Experience managing people across one or more teams, ideally working with large, distributed Internet-facing systems.
• Background in medium/large companies: understanding the interconnections between various teams and features is vital for success in this role.
• Proven expertise in leading the delivery of ML-powered products or Retrieval systems to production.
• Phenomenal communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Refined prioritization skills: you are able to focus your and the team’s time and energy where it’ll have the most impact.
• A dedication to continual self-development.
• Collaborative, upbeat work ethic where you can take ownership and have fun.

Tech Stack

• Our codebase is primarily written in Ruby and Python.
• Data is stored in RDS MySQL, Redis, S3, Elasticsearch and Kafka.
• 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

• Full ownership of the projects you work on.
• Exciting opportunity to work on Retrieval and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), a rapidly evolving field in AI and natural language processing.
• Ownership of product features at scale, making a significant impact for millions of end-users.
• A team of passionate people who love what they do.
• Exciting projects, with the ability to implement your own ideas and improvements.
• Opportunity to learn and grow.

Where We Work

We’re rapidly growing our teams in Lisbon - Portugal and Krakow - Poland. We have exciting next-generation ML-powered products that are already in use by customers in the banking and finance area, online and offline retailers, and even national postal services. You will work with a driven team, passionate about delivering the right experience to end-users using sophisticated and pioneering ML technology.

#LI-MK12

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.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

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.