Senior Ruby Software Engineer – San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Senior Software Engineer – Email Engineering

Job Summary

The Zendesk Email Processing team is hiring a Senior Software Engineer with extensive experience in developing and maintaining large-scale SaaS platforms. This is a hybrid role, and candidates must be based in San Francisco, CA; Madison, WI; or Austin, TX.

As a key part of Zendesk’s flagship Support product, our team focuses on the email channel—the most widely used communication method by our customers. Handling millions of emails daily, we ensure fast, reliable email processing and notification delivery that our customers depend on. This role is ideal for someone with strong technical expertise, excellent problem-solving abilities, and a passion for working on high-volume, complex systems.

What you’ll be doing

• Take ownership of designing, developing, testing, and deploying high-quality, efficient software solutions independently.

• Enhance code quality for yourself and your teammates through peer reviews, pair programming, and active knowledge sharing.

• Monitor email processing systems to detect issues early, troubleshoot problems, and resolve production incidents.

• Enhance email system reliability by optimizing code, enhancing monitoring, ensuring security compliance, and improving change management processes.

• Collaborate closely with customer advocates to identify and fix bugs affecting customers and end users.

• Develop and maintain clear, comprehensive documentation for the team and across Zendesk.

• Provide accurate work estimates and prioritize tasks by balancing trade-offs and working with stakeholders.

• Uphold engineering best practices throughout the design, development, and maintenance of our systems.

What you bring to the role

•  Required:

  • Over 5 years of experience designing, developing, testing, and delivering stable, reliable software solutions in production environments.

  • Strong background in building large-scale backend systems using Ruby, with a focus on writing clean, efficient, and maintainable code that meets high availability and performance standards.

  • Proficient in observability tools, preferably DataDog, to monitor and improve system health.

  • Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure technologies, particularly AWS, including infrastructure as code and Kubernetes.

  • Familiarity with front-end technologies such as React/Redux and CSS frameworks is a plus.

• Preferred: 

  • Experience working with relational databases, key-value data stores, and messaging or queueing systems such as Kafka and SQS.

  • Knowledge of email protocols and standards—including common issues—and familiarity with technologies like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Tech Stack

• Our codebase is primarily written in Ruby and Golang.

• We deploy and manage our services using a combination of Kubernetes and EC2 instances, all hosted on AWS.

• Our services leverage various AWS technologies, including ElastiCache/Redis, MySQL (Aurora), SQS, Kafka, and more. 

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $145,000.00-$217,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

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.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.