Senior Backend Engineer

Zendesk · Austin, Texas · $145,000.00-$217,000.00 · hybrid Join Zendesk as a Senior Backend Engineer, focusing on the data layer for AI products. You'll build and scale integrations and analytics infrastructure to transform raw support data into automation recommendations, helping customers reduce support costs and improve outcomes. Key Responsibilities: Design, build, and maintain platform connectors (ETL) across third-party systems. Extend and scale the Discover insights engine for topic clustering, knowledge gap detection, and automation recommendations. Build and operate resilient data pipelines with real-time webhooks and metrics aggregation. Design, optimize, and maintain search indices and aggregation pipelines for full-text, vector, and hybrid search. Solve distributed systems problems like multi-tenant isolation and webhook security. Collaborate with product, ML, and design teams to turn analytics into customer-facing metrics. Requirements: 3+ years of professional backend engineering experience, preferably in B2B SaaS. Proficient in Python and backend frameworks like FastAPI. Experience with MongoDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and Redis. Knowledge of distributed job processing patterns and worker queue design. Preferred Qualifications: Experience with ETL/orchestration tools like Dagster or Airflow. Familiarity with NLP pipelines, embeddings, or production RAG systems. System design experience for multi-tenant SaaS and webhook security. Prior work on analytics engines translating metrics into product recommendations. The US annualized base salary range for this position is $145,000.00-$217,000.00.