Job Description

Job Summary

Zendesk holds a vast amount of knowledge about how our customers resolve issues for their customers. The Maquina team turns that knowledge into action — building AI-powered procedures that guide agents step by step through complex workflows, and increasingly letting conversational AI agents handle them autonomously. Our work is built on one of the largest Retrieval Augmented Generation platforms in the customer experience space, already in use by customers in banking, retail, and public services.

We're looking for a well-rounded Staff Engineer to join the Maquina team in Lisbon. The team collaborates closely with sister teams in Copenhagen and with data science and ML partners. You'll need to be comfortable navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving product area, and balancing long-term architecture with short-term delivery.

What you'll be doing

• Actively shape and develop our Ruby on Rails and TypeScript-based services.

• Participate in and lead brainstorming, designing, prototyping, and programming within an agile environment.

• Spearhead the resolution of complex reliability problems at scale, showcasing comprehensive expertise across the entire technology stack.

• Champion a deep understanding of the product and cultivate a customer-centric approach within the team.

• Lead, mentor, and teach colleagues at various career levels, imparting advanced insights and promoting a culture of continuous improvement.

• Effectively communicate complex changes, strategies, and technical decisions to stakeholders within the organization with a high level of clarity and consideration.

• Guide the team in exploring architectural strategies through consensus based decision making and documenting decisions.

• Drive AI adoption on the team, showing how and where AI use makes us more effective.

What you bring to the role

Required:

• 6+ years of experience writing and maintaining high-availability services in Ruby on Rails/NodeJS/TypeScript.

• Experience with LLM integrations and AI feature implementation at the Enterprise level.

• Strong engineering, architectural experience and extensive knowledge in systems design.

• Autonomy to lead a project through its execution, while also knowing when to consult with others.

• Able to mentor and lead engineers, contributing to an enjoyable work environment that promotes teamwork.

• Experience using observability tools to ensure system reliability at scale.

• Open minded and inclusive mentality, both for your colleagues and your work.

• English proficiency both spoken and written.

Preferred:

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.

• Experience with Content Management Systems

• Experience with event-driven architecture and event sourcing.

• Experience developing and operating high volume, high availability environments.

• Experience with container orchestration using Docker, Kubernetes and cloud services on AWS or similar.

• Familiarity with modern JS frameworks.

• Contributor or owner of open source projects.

Tech Stack

The team works with:

• Backend microservices in Ruby on Rails and TypeScript.

• GraphQL API layer.

• React frontend with TypeScript.

• AWS Aurora (MySQL), Kafka for event streaming, Elasticsearch for search.

• Kubernetes and AWS for deployment.

Where we work

We're growing our engineering presence in Lisbon, Portugal, alongside our established teams in Copenhagen, Denmark and other hubs across the globe. This role is based in Lisbon with regular collaboration with Copenhagen. We support flexible working arrangements within the Lisbon time zone, but do expect at least two days a week of working from our Lisbon office.

Who we are

We believe in putting people first, doing outstanding work, and continuously learning. We are musicians, parents, gamers, travelers, pet lovers, photographers, programmers, and more. We value working in a diverse and inclusive environment, the different perspectives this brings, and having our assumptions challenged, enabling us to grow and learn, together.

You'll join us at an exciting point — AI-powered customer service is moving from assistive to autonomous, and Maquina is at the centre of that shift within Zendesk.

We look forward to hearing how you can help us build both a great product and a great team.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

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.