Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

At Zendesk, we are passionate about building software that delivers the ultimate customer experience. Your favourite brands use our products to engage with you as a customer, and we lead the industry with breathtakingly simple software.

Zendesk Explore is our analytics product. It is a complex business intelligence application, serving 100,000 customers and utilising data from over 500 million Zendesk users and 40+ external data source connectors. Explore ingests millions of records from the Zendesk product family and then allows them to be queried and visualised at low latency—at scale.

What you will do as a Staff Engineer

• Be a hands‑on developer, actively contributing to the codebase on a daily basis and reviewing peers’ code.
• Create and maintain data pipeline architecture and data stores.
• Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements such as automating manual processes, optimising data delivery, and redesigning infrastructure for greater scalability.
• Work with data and analytics experts to enhance the functionality of our data systems.
• Lead and participate in technical decisions and communicate them with product and technical leads.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineering managers, and support advocates to estimate and prioritise work.
• Mentor less experienced engineers.
• Own the full release cycle from development to deployment.
• Debug tricky intermittent issues, determine root causes, and implement automated tests to prevent recurrence.
• Put the customer first and maintain a focus on quality.
• Grow and learn new things by collaborating with support, product, and senior engineers.

About you

• At least six years of proven experience in developing data pipelines or big data environments.
• Advanced SQL skills and experience with relational databases and query authoring.
• Significant experience with Spark on AWS EMR (or equivalent)
• Comfortable coding in Java and/or Scala.
• Extensive knowledge of distributed systems.
• Data‑driven decision making, able to analyse complex situations.
• Ability to lead a group of engineers in technical initiatives.
• Strong white‑boarding and scientific problem‑solving skills.
• Excellent communication, both presenting and listening with peers.
• Experience working at a global scale and releasing critical features to production.
• Project decomposition into smaller iterative units.
• Enjoy learning new technologies and expanding knowledge.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting and working with cross‑functional teams in a dynamic environment.
• Familiarity with other programming languages.
• Front‑end knowledge – preferably React or Angular.
• DevOps experience (Docker, CoreOS, CI/CD, AWS).

What our tech stack looks like

Our code is written in Ruby, Scala, Typescript and Go. Our data is stored in RDS MySQL, Redis, Redshift and Aurora. Our services are deployed to ECS using Docker on AWS. Our data pipeline uses Spark on AWS EMR.

What we offer

• Full ownership of the projects you work on.
• High‑impact work that matters to customers.
• A team of passionate people who love what they do.
• Exciting projects, ability to implement your ideas and improvements.
• Professional development funds.
• Flexible working hours and remote options.
• Comfortable office and equipment choice.
• Premium medical insurance and private life assurance.
• Lunch vouchers and travel ticket reimbursement.