Staff Frontend Software Engineer - AI Copilot

Zendesk

Lisbon or Remote, Portugal

We are looking for a Staff Frontend Engineer to join our AI Copilot organisation. AI Copilot is a multi-million ARR product that puts AI directly into the hands of customer service agents and administrators. You will own the delivery of frontend experiences that bring AI-powered capabilities to life for our customers, taking features from design through to production.

What you'll be doing

Own and deliver end-to-end frontend features - from technical design through implementation, testing, release, and iteration.
Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, setting architectural direction and raising the bar for engineering quality and delivery practices.
Build polished, performant, and accessible user interfaces that surface AI-powered capabilities to customer service agents and administrators.
Work closely with Product Management and Design to turn product requirements into well-scoped, high-quality user experiences.
Collaborate with ML Engineers and backend engineers to integrate AI-powered features seamlessly into the frontend.
Contribute to technical design discussions and architecture decisions within your team, with growing influence across teams.
Improve the performance, reliability, and maintainability of the frontend systems you work on - proactively identifying and addressing technical debt.
Contribute to our design system adoption and component library, ensuring consistency across the product.
Mentor more junior engineers through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing.

What you bring to the role

Required

10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on frontend development.
Fluent in TypeScript and React; working proficiency in Ruby (Rails) is a plus.
Solid experience with modern frontend architecture: component-based design, state management, and responsive, accessible interfaces.
Strong understanding of web fundamentals: browser APIs, performance, accessibility, and cross-browser compatibility.
Experience with frontend testing: unit and integration testing with Jest, React Testing Library, or equivalent.
A track record of owning features end-to-end and delivering them to production with high quality.
Ability to work with uncertainty and the flexibility to pivot with changing priorities.
Strong collaboration skills - you work effectively with designers, backend engineers, and product managers.

Preferred

Experience with design systems and component libraries - building or extending shared components at scale.
Familiarity with micro-frontend architectures or module federation.
Experience with Storybook for component development and documentation.
Familiarity with internationalisation (i18n) and localisation.
Experience with frontend observability and analytics tooling (e.g., Sentry, Pendo, Segment).
Experience building user interfaces for AI/ML-powered features.
Experience with iterative, metrics-driven product development (A/B testing, feature flags, incremental rollouts).

Tech Stack

Our frontend is built with React and TypeScript.
We use Garden, Zendesk's design system, for UI components.
Our admin interfaces use a micro-frontend architecture with module federation.
We use webpack for bundling and pnpm for package management.
We test with Jest, React Testing Library, and MSW; we develop components in Storybook.
Our backend services are written in Ruby (Rails) and Python.
Feature flags for controlled rollouts.
Error tracking with Sentry; analytics with Pendo and Segment.
Our services are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker on AWS.
Heavy usage of LLM technology from multiple providers via our LLM Proxy.