AI Team Engineering Manager – up to €75k/year

About the role

Zendesk is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead its AI‑focused Maquina team in Lisbon. You will take ownership of a newly formed group, shaping its technical direction while delivering an ambitious AI product roadmap that powers customer‑experience workflows.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, coach and grow a team of engineers through regular 1:1s, feedback and career development.
• Partner with the Product Manager and Tech Lead to plan and ship AI‑driven procedures, from recommendation engines to autonomous agent execution.
• Own delivery metrics: capacity planning, sprint health, backlog quality and release cadence.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership in Copenhagen and other global teams to align on cross‑team dependencies and architecture.
• Drive operational excellence, including incident response, SLO ownership and continuous process improvement.
• Manage end‑to‑end hiring, ensuring a diverse and inclusive team.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field.
• At least 2 years of experience managing a software engineering team, including hiring and performance management.
• Strong background as an individual contributor, able to engage in architectural discussions and code reviews.
• Proven track record delivering products in an agile environment with clear delivery metrics.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, comfortable working across locations and time zones.

Required skills

• Cloud services
• Microservice architectures
• Event‑driven systems