Staff AI Agent Engineer (Machine Learning) in Manchester

The Agentic Tribe is revolutionising the chatbot and voice assistance landscape with Gen3, a cutting‑edge AI Agent system that is pushing the boundaries of conversational AI. Gen3 isn’t your typical chatbot; it’s a goal‑oriented, dynamic, and truly conversational system capable of reasoning, planning, and adapting to user needs in real time.

About the Role

We’re seeking a highly experienced and influential AI Agent Engineer to join our team. In this role, you’ll be dedicated to driving innovation and technical leadership at the forefront of AI technology, with a focus on designing, developing, and deploying intelligent, autonomous agents that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline operations. You’ll shape the cognitive architecture for our AI‑powered applications, creating systems that can reason, plan, and execute complex, multi‑step tasks, and guiding other engineers.

You’ll own critical, cross‑cutting technical initiatives that impact multiple teams, serve as a go‑to expert for complex problems, and proactively engage with a broad range of stakeholders to influence strategy and execution.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and lead the development of robust, stateful, and scalable AI agents using Python and modern agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), setting technical direction and best practices for engineering teams.
• Strategise and oversee the integration of AI agent solutions with existing enterprise systems, databases, and third‑party APIs to create seamless, end‑to‑end workflows across the product, identifying and mitigating architectural risks.
• Evaluate and select appropriate foundation models and services from third‑party providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), analysing their strengths, weaknesses, and cost‑effectiveness for specific use cases.
• Own and drive the entire lifecycle of AI Agent deployment, from concept to production and beyond for large, ambiguous, or highly complex initiatives—collaborate closely with cross‑functional teams, including product leadership and ML scientists to understand strategic needs and deliver highly effective agent solutions.
• Troubleshoot, debug, and optimise complex AI systems, ensuring exceptional performance, reliability, and scalability in production environments, and mentoring other engineers in advanced problem‑solving techniques.
• Define, establish, and continuously improve platforms and methodologies for evaluating AI agent performance, setting key metrics, driving iterative improvements across the organisation, and influencing industry best practices.
• Establish and enforce best practices for documentation of development processes, architectural decisions, code, and research findings to ensure comprehensive knowledge sharing and maintainability across the team and wider engineering organisation.
• Mentor and guide more junior and mid‑level developers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning, and contributing to the growth and career development of others.

Core Technical Competencies

• Expert in LLM‑Oriented System Design: Architecting and designing complex multi‑step, tool‑using agents (e.g., LangChain, Autogen). Deep understanding of prompt engineering, context management, and LLM behaviour quirks (e.g., hallucinations, determinism, temperature effects). Ability to implement advanced reasoning patterns like Chain‑of‑Thought and multi‑agent communication.
• Mastery of Tool Integration & APIs: Designing and implementing secure and scalable integrations of agents with external tools, databases, and APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) in complex execution environments, often involving novel solutions or significant architectural considerations.
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG): Designing, building, and optimising highly performant and robust RAG pipelines with vector databases, chunking, and sophisticated hybrid search techniques.
• Leadership in Evaluation & Observability: Defining, implementing LLM evaluation frameworks and comprehensive monitoring for latency, accuracy, and tool usage across production systems, influencing the observability strategy.
• Safety & Reliability: Designing and implementing state‑of‑the‑art defenses against prompt injection and robust guardrails (e.g., Rebuff, Guardrails AI) and complex fallback strategies.
• Performance Optimisation: Deep expertise in managing LLM token budgets and latency through smart model routing, caching (e.g., Redis), and other advanced optimisation techniques, identifying and addressing systemic performance bottlenecks.
• Planning & Reasoning: Designing and implementing cutting‑edge agents with long‑term memory and highly complex planning capabilities (e.g., ReAct, Tree‑of‑Thought).
• Programming & Tooling: Expert in Python, FastAPI, and LLM SDKs; extensive experience and strategic contributions with cloud deployment (AWS/GCP/Azure) and CI/CD for complex AI applications.

Bonus Points (Preferred Qualifications)

• Ph.D / Masters in a relevant field (e.g., Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, NLP).
• Comprehensive understanding of foundational ML concepts (attention, embeddings, transfer learning).
• Experience adapting academic research into production‑ready code.
• Familiarity with fine‑tuning techniques (e.g., PEFT, LoRA).

The Interview Process

• Initial Call with Talent Team - 15 mins
• Interview with one member of the Hiring Team - 45 minutes
• Take‑home technical challenge
• A technical interview with two of our developers to talk more in‑depth about your technical experience and answer any questions you might have - 1 hour
• Final interview with 2 of the following: Senior Director and Engineering Manager - 45 minutes

Salary and Working Arrangements

The Poland annualised base salary range for this position is zł374,000.00‑zł560,000.00. Please note that while the salary range represents the minimum and maximum base salary rate for this position, the actual compensation offered will be based on job‑related capabilities, applicable experience, and other relevant factors. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives that will be communicated during the offer stage.

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.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.