Staff Software Engineer

Zendesk's people have one goal in mind: to make Customer Experience better. Our products help more than 145,000 global brands (AirBnb, Uber, JetBrains, Slack, among others) make their customers happy, every day.

We're looking for a well-rounded Staff Engineer to be part of our efforts to use AI in providing the world's best customer service. We have a huge amount of knowledge about how our customers solve issues for their customers. At the same time, we are building a Knowledge Hub that ingests and processes content from multiple sources, fully integrated with our Customer and Employee Service offerings. Conversational AI agents can use this knowledge to solve problems better and faster, including taking actions on behalf of customers, supervised by human agents. 

This is where you come in. We're standing up a new team to increase our capability in this field, and so along with your team, you will have a massive impact on how this initiative evolves. You will join an organization with a mission to disrupt the Knowledge generation and retrieval space, powering all Zendesk AI experiences.

• Lead a team of experienced Engineers, offering technical direction and assistance at every stage of the lifecycle of the project.

• Delivering AI-powered capabilities to our customers at Zendesk scale.

• Working closely with Product, Management and the rest of Knowledge engineering to define the scope of features and implementation approach.

• Actively collaborating in evolving the workflow and processes together with the members of the team.

• Supporting our deployed services to ensure a high level of stability and reliability.

• Mentoring junior team members, as well as pairing with more experienced colleagues and learning from each other.

• 6+ years developing server-side applications in Ruby, Java or similar backend programming languages.

• Demonstrated ability to build and operate distributed systems at scale.

• Expertise in relational data stores (MySQL, Postgres).

• Experience with provisioning and deploying services with a cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure).

• Sound understanding of architecture and software design patterns for server-side and web domains.

• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.

• Open, thoughtful, and empathetic approach to your work.

• A desire to continually learn and share technical skills.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science/Information Systems or related field. 

• Experience developing web applications in Typescript.

• Experience working on high throughput messaging systems like Kafka.

• Experience with graph databases, e.g. Neo4J, Amazon Neptune etc.

• Experience in performance testing, capacity planning, and cost optimization for large-scale, complex data pipelines and systems. This includes identifying bottlenecks, ensuring scalability, and minimizing operational costs in cloud-based data environments.

• Contributor or owner of open source projects.

• Our code is written in Ruby, TypeScript and React.

• Our servers live in AWS.

• Our services interface through Kafka, REST and GraphQL on top of Istio.

• Our data is stored in S3, RDS MySQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, and Aurora.

• Our services are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker.

• What you will be doing will have a huge impact.

• Team of passionate people who love what they do.

• Exciting projects, ability to implement your own ideas and improvements.

• Opportunity to learn and grow.

We're rapidly growing our teams in Krakow, Poland and Lisbon, Portugal. We have exciting next-generation AI-powered products that are already in use by customers in the banking and finance area, online and offline retailers, and even national postal services. You will work with a driven team, passionate about delivering the right experience to end-users using sophisticated data ingestion and retrieval technology.

#LI-EA1

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

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.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we're proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to with your specific accommodation request.