Engineering Manager, Machine Learning

Engineering Manager, Machine Learning
Setúbal
Setúbal, Setubal, Portugal

Machine Learning Engineering Manager – Setúbal, Portugal

Zendesk’s people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. Our products help more than 125, 000 global brands (Airbnb, Uber, Jet
Brains, Slack, among others) make their billions of customers happy, every day.

The AI/ML Platform team is at the forefront of this mission. We build the foundation that powers every AI‑driven experience at Zendesk, enabling product teams to build, evaluate, and deploy large‑language‑model (LLM) applications reliably and at scale.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the next wave of Gen
AI infrastructure at Zendesk. This includes our internal LLM Proxy, benchmarking framework, data annotations, and agentic workflow orchestration tools. You’ll empower Zendesk’s ML/AI teams by building secure, optimized, and friendly ML platforms that scale across use cases and products.

You’ll work with different partners (Engineering, Product, Architects, and Tech Leads) to ensure your team's roadmap is aligned with company strategy and the team is shipping architecturally sound software at a regular cadence.

• Lead a high‑performing team of AI/ML platform engineers to deliver the core infrastructure powering LLM‑based applications.
• Own the design, rollout, and optimization of Zendesk’s LLM Proxy, enabling safe, observable, and efficient access to multiple foundation models.
• Collaborate with existing ML/AI leadership to continually improve software delivery and service reliability.
• Partner with applied ML, product, and infrastructure teams to align platform investments with AI roadmap priorities.
• Establish strong engineering practices around observability, reliability, security, and cost monitoring.
• Foster a team culture that emphasizes mentorship, inclusion, and technical excellence.

• Proven experience managing high‑performing engineering teams in the ML/AI or infrastructure space.
• Deep understanding of LLM systems, Gen
  AI applications, or ML/AI platform components such as vector databases, serving layers, and orchestration tools.
• Experience owning the full lifecycle of an ML/AI platform, from early design to production deployment.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams and partners.
• A pragmatic mindset: balancing innovation with scalability and performance in enterprise environments.
• A dedication to continual development and a collaborative, upbeat work ethic.

• Python codebase.
• AWS infrastructure.
• LLM vendors: Open
  AI, Anthropic, Google, Llama.
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, AWS.

• Full ownership of the projects you work on.
• High impact work with a huge influence.
• A team of passionate people who love what they do.
• Exciting projects with opportunities to implement your own ideas and improvements.
• Professional development funds and a flexible working schedule.
• Comfortable office and remote setup;
  
  
  
  choice of laptop and equipment.
• Premium medical insurance and private life assurance.

Hybrid: In this role, you must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific office schedule will be determined by the hiring manager.

Zendesk is an equal‑opportunity employer. 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 visit this page. Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans in accordance with applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation, please send your request to