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 an Engineering Manager to lead the Maquina team from Lisbon. You'll take over a recently established team and grow it as the product scales. This is a hands-on leadership role — you'll shape the team's technical direction alongside the tech lead, manage delivery of an ambitious AI product roadmap, and establish your own leadership presence in the Lisbon office.

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

• Lead and grow a team of engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and career development through regular 1:1s and goal-setting.

• Partner with the Product Manager and Tech Lead to plan and deliver on the procedures roadmap — from recommendation engines to autonomous agent execution.

• Own delivery: capacity planning, sprint health, backlog quality, and shipping cadence.

• Collaborate with engineering leadership in Copenhagen and with other team around the globe to align on cross-team dependencies and architectural decisions.

• Drive operational excellence — incident response, SLO ownership, and continuous improvement of team processes.

• Build a diverse, inclusive team: own hiring end-to-end, from writing job descriptions to closing candidates.

• Foster a culture of pragmatism, psychological safety, technical craft, and fun.

What you bring to the role

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Information Systems or related field.

• 2+ years of experience managing a software engineering team, including hiring, performance management, and career development.

• A background as an individual contributor on engineering projects — you can engage meaningfully in architectural discussions and code reviews.

• Experience delivering products in an agile environment with clear delivery metrics (cycle time, throughput, defect rate).

• Strong collaboration skills — you've worked effectively with product, design, and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Experience managing or building a team across locations or time zones.

• Clear, direct communication — you give feedback with care and seek problems head-on.

• You understand how and where AI can accelerate you and your team, and are not afraid to experiment and learn.

Preferred:

• Experience with cloud services, microservice architectures, and event-driven systems.

• Familiarity with AI/ML-powered product development — you've shipped features that integrate with language models or recommendation systems.

• Experience growing a team's headcount and shaping its culture.

• Knowledge of Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, or similar backend stacks.

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.

You won't be expected to write code, but you'll be expected to understand the systems well enough to guide technical decisions, unblock your team and approve the odd PR.

What we offer

• Full ownership of your team's products and delivery.

• A high-impact role shaping how AI is used in customer service at scale.

• The opportunity to grow and shape a team in Lisbon.

• Collaboration with experienced engineering teams in Copenhagen.

• A culture that values learning, craft, and people over process.

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.