Senior Staff Software Engineer (Full-Stack)

Job Description

The Zendesk Agent Experience team is hiring a well-rounded full-stack Senior Staff 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 core user experience that our customers interact with on a daily basis. Agent Workspace is the unified user experience that empowers agents to efficiently manage interactions across all Zendesk channels within a single ticket interface. It plays a crucial role in how customers engage with Zendesk Support, and represents the core of the overall product experience, fundamentally driving customer success. We believe empathy is the greatest virtue for building the best products and the greatest environment for growing together as a team, adapting quickly and constantly innovating.

This role is ideal for engineers who are customer focused and thrive on solving complex performance challenges, creating seamless user experiences, and designing scalable web application architectures. You should have experience in successfully leading technical initiatives and delivering production ready software. 

What you’ll be doing

• Lead the design, development, and maintenance of complex, scalable, high-performance web applications, defining and implementing cutting-edge architecture and development best practices.
• Drive key technology decisions and ensure alignment with overall business and product strategies, collaborating closely with cross-functional stakeholders to understand requirements to deliver high-quality, A11y compliant solutions.
• Mentor and guide engineers and tech leads, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence and promoting a culture of accountability and transparency in project deliverables and timelines.
• Lead by example: Conduct and participate in thorough design and code reviews to maintain high development standards, ensuring the code is clean, efficient, and maintainable. 
• Document, evangelize, and communicate best practices in all our frameworks and tools.
• Optimize application performance to ensure fast and responsive user experiences across a variety of platforms.
• Identify and lead opportunities for innovation in our products and processes, proactively contributing to prototyping and developing new features, standards, and tools that add value to our products.
• Communicate effectively with business owners and other stakeholders to understand business needs and translate them into technical requirements, working collaboratively with cross-functional teams to ensure continuous delivery of value to our customers.
• Actively participate in strategic planning and roadmapping sessions, providing technical insights and aligning technical goals with business objectives.
• Stay updated with the latest industry trends, technologies, and best practices to ensure continuous improvement and innovation.

What you bring to the role

Required:

• 10+ years of industry experience with at least 8+ years in full-stack software development in a SaaS company or a product development organization
• Proven track record of delivering large-scale, high-quality, and secure web applications.
• Deep understanding of web application development and excellent proficiency in JavaScript, Typescript, HTML5, CSS3, and modern front-end frameworks (such as React or Vue.js).
• Proficiency in Ruby and/or at least one JVM language.
• Some experience developing and integrating GraphQL services into frontend applications.
• Experience in leading architectural decision-making processes and mentoring a team.
• Deep understanding of cross-browser compatibility issues, responsive design, web architecture.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain complex technical decisions to audiences with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Experience working with observability tools (e.g., DataDog) and optimizing UI responsiveness for structured workflows.
• Ability to work independently and in a team, with a proactive approach to improving processes and outcomes.
• A quality, balanced approach to development and testing, including TDD where appropriate.

Preferred: 

• Experience with event-driven, distributed architecture using Kafka.
• Familiarity with relational data stores like MySQL and Aurora, and systems like MySQL, ElasticSearch, Redis.
• Strong verifiable contributions to open-source software would be nice to have.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, GraphQL
• Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Java, MySQL
• DevOps & Monitoring: DataDog, CI/CD tools
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes (nice-to-have)

#LI-JH1

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $183,000.00-$275,000.00. 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.