Senior AI Agent Engineer

Senior AI Agent Engineer - Voice AI Join Zendesk as a Senior AI Agent Engineer - Voice AI. Job Description: The Agentic Tribe is revolutionizing the chatbot and voice assistance landscape with Gen3, a cutting‑edge AI Agent system that pushes the boundaries of conversational AI. Gen3 is not 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. Leveraging a multi‑agent architecture and advanced language models, Gen3 delivers personalized and engaging user experiences, going far beyond scripted interactions to handle complex tasks and “off‑script” inquiries with ease. What You Will Do Design and develop robust, stateful, and scalable voice‑first AI agents using Python, specifically optimized for real‑time voice interactions, managing turn‑taking, interruptions, and low‑latency responses. Integrate best‑in‑class real‑time Speech‑to‑Text (STT), Text‑to‑Speech (TTS), and Voice Activity Detection (VAD) services to create a seamless conversational flow. Connect voice agents with existing enterprise systems, databases, and third‑party APIs to create powerful, end‑to‑end automated workflows initiated and managed through voice. Establish and own the Evals for voice agent performance and behavior and iterate over time and systematically improve performance, reliability, and the overall user experience. Build end‑to‑end conversational flows with reasoning, planning, and dynamic tool use—beyond pre‑scripted voice experiences. Work cross‑functionally with product managers, ML scientists, and engineers to deeply understand user needs and voice interaction goals. Implement fallback, recovery, and error‑handling strategies to deal with noisy audio input or speech recognition inaccuracies. Define and track voice‑specific evaluation metrics (e.g., word error rate, latency, conversational naturalness). Develop observability tools and guardrails to monitor performance, ensure safety, and handle edge cases in spoken interactions. Document your development, architecture decisions, and research findings to share knowledge across the team. Requirements LLM‑Oriented System Design: Strong experience building multi‑step, tool‑using agents (LangChain, Autogen). Familiar with prompt engineering, context management, and reasoning strategies like Chain‑of‑Thought and ReAct. Voice AI Expertise: Experience building low‑latency, streaming voice applications. Expertise in integrating and managing real‑time STT/TTS models and APIs. Proficient with techniques for Voice Activity Detection (VAD), noise suppression, and implementing robust barge‑in/interruption logic. Experience with integrating third‑party voice AI APIs, including Speech‑to‑Text (STT) and Text‑to‑Speech (TTS) services from providers like OpenAI, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, etc. Understanding of latency, timing, and streaming audio constraints. Tool Integration & APIs: Comfortable connecting agents to external APIs, tools, databases in secure environments. RAG (Retrieval‑Augmented Generation): Building pipelines with vector stores, chunking strategies, and hybrid retrieval. Evaluation & Observability: Implementing and using monitoring tools and evaluation frameworks (Braintrust) to score our AI Agents. Safety & Reliability: Familiarity with techniques for prompt injection defense, guardrails (Rebuff, Guardrails AI), and failover logic. Performance Optimization: Token budget and latency management using caching, model routing, etc. Programming & Deployment: Expert in Python, FastAPI, and LLM SDKs. Experience deploying AI apps to cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) using CI/CD best practices. Nice‑to‑have M.S. / Ph.D. in Computer Science, NLP, Machine Learning, or related field. Background in spoken dialogue systems or conversational UX design. Familiarity with real‑time streaming architecture (e.g., WebRTC, gRPC, socket.io). Multilingual ASR/TTS pipeline experience. About Zendesk Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement, and they give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth. With more than 100,000 paid customer accounts in over 150 countries, Zendesk is an equal‑opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. Individuals seeking employment at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes. Zendesk’s Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where it may be processed, its purposes for processing, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk’s use of your personal information. Hybrid work: This role requires you to attend the local office part of the week. The specific in‑office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager. 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr