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 Senior Software Engineer to join us in Lisbon and help shape the next generation of this product. You'll work across the full stack — from the recommendation engine that surfaces the right procedure, to the agent-facing UI, to the runtime that executes procedures on behalf of customers.

Our team takes on complex challenges that span multiple services, data pipelines, and ML integrations. We value clear communication, deep understanding of the problems we tackle, and pragmatic engineering — shipping working software over debating abstractions.

What you'll be doing

• Design, build, and operate services that power AI-driven procedure recommendations and execution.

• Work on the integration between our knowledge base and conversational AI agents, enabling autonomous resolution of customer issues.

• Improve the procedure authoring and management experience for Zendesk admins.

• Collaborate with data science and ML teams on recommendation models and evaluation.

• Contribute to architectural decisions and help the team navigate trade-offs in a fast-moving product area.

• Participate in code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing across the team.

• Take ownership of the full lifecycle: design, development, testing, deployment, and production operations.

What you bring to the role

Required

• 4+ years of experience in a backend or full-stack application engineering role.

• Strong engineering and systems design skills — you can reason about service boundaries, data flows, and failure modes.

• Experience building and operating services at scale with high availability expectations.

• Comfort working in a codebase that blends multiple languages and paradigms.

• You believe great software is a team effort and enjoy learning together through pairing, code reviews, and tech talks.

• Strong communication skills — you can explain technical decisions clearly and listen well.

Preferred

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

• Experience with Ruby on Rails or TypeScript in production.

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and stream processing (e.g. Kafka).

• Experience integrating with LLMs or building AI-powered product features.

• Experience with domain-driven design or event sourcing patterns.

• Contributor to open source projects.

Tech Stack

• Our backend is a blend of Ruby on Rails and TypeScript microservices.

• We use GraphQL and REST for our API layer.

• Our frontend is React with TypeScript.

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

• We deploy on Kubernetes and AWS.

Where we work

We're growing our engineering presence in Lisbon, Portugal, alongside our established teams in Copenhagen, Denmark and other hubs around the world. 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 enable even better relationships between our customers and their customers.

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.