Staff Software Engineer
Description
Job Description
Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences, because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection.
Zendesk is establishing a world-class Research & Development centre in Pune and is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help design and deliver scalable, reliable systems that power AI-augmented customer experiences. In this role you’ll own complex components end-to-end, influence architecture and technical direction, and mentor other engineers to raise the team’s technical bar and accelerate product impact.
Summary
As a Staff Software Engineer you will lead technical delivery for significant product areas—designing, implementing, and operating high-performance front-end applications and the backend services that power them. You’ll influence technical strategy, improve developer productivity and delivery practices, and mentor engineers to raise the technical bar across the organisation.
What you’ll be doing
Lead end-to-end design and delivery of large, complex features and platform components—from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable backend microservices and APIs (Java 11+/Vert.x or comparable stacks) and high-performance front-end applications (TypeScript/React), ensuring secure, reliable API connectivity (REST/GraphQL).
Drive architecture and system design decisions across front-end and backend domains to improve scalability, performance, maintainability, and operability.
Lead front-end modernization efforts: replace legacy web app features with modern frameworks and tooling (React, Redux, TypeScript, GraphQL), document and evangelize best practices, and improve developer workflows.
Champion reliability and observability: define SLOs/SLIs, lead post-incident reviews, reduce operational toil, improve runbooks, and strengthen incident response practices.
Troubleshoot and resolve performance and scalability bottlenecks across the stack—profiling, diagnosing, and shipping fixes that improve user experience.
Build reusable platform capabilities, APIs, and abstractions to accelerate product teams and eliminate duplicated effort.
Mentor and coach engineers and tech leads: conduct design and code reviews, provide constructive feedback, create documentation and architecture diagrams, and foster a culture of continuous learning, accountability, and technical excellence.
Collaborate with globally distributed cross‑functional partners (Product, Design/UX, Security, SRE, QA, Program Management) to balance business value, risk mitigation, and technical debt.
Contribute to hiring—define evaluation rubrics, participate in interviews, own onboarding and early success criteria (first 90/180 days), and help grow the team’s expertise.
Influence technical strategy and roadmap: prototype improvements, advocate for sustainable architecture and tooling, and participate in long-range planning.
What you bring to the role
Strong engineering fundamentals: system design, data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed systems thinking.
Demonstrated track record of delivering large-scale production systems with measurable impact.
Deep front-end expertise: excellent JavaScript/TypeScript skills, strong experience with React and its ecosystem, and solid understanding of browser internals (event loop, DOM, async).
Substantial backend experience (Java 11+ preferred—Vert.x a plus—or Node.js, Go, or Python) with a proven ability to design scalable, maintainable services in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Hands-on experience with microservices architectures, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and API design (REST/gRPC/GraphQL).
Practical experience with observability (metrics, logs, tracing), CI/CD, automated testing (unit through end-to-end), and performance profiling.
Ability to translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical plans and to communicate trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team; comfortable contributing to code and architecture while operating at a strategic level.
Product-minded and empathetic: you balance speed with long-term maintainability and care about the end-user and internal developer experience.
Promote an “AI-First” mindset: strategically embed AI into products and workflows to drive efficiency and innovation, ensuring usage is purposeful and ethical.
Required qualifications
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial ownership of production systems and experience leading large technical efforts.
Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and React for front-end development; solid backend language proficiency in one or more production languages (Go, Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js).
Experience designing and operating cloud-native services, with exposure to production monitoring and incident response.
Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives and mentor mid/senior-level engineers.
Preferred qualifications
Prior experience modernizing legacy web applications and improving developer workflows and toolchains.
Experience with GraphQL, reactive front-end patterns, or advanced front-end performance optimization.
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, service meshes, and modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger).
Deep knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB) and caching strategies (Redis).
Contributions to open-source projects, published technical writing, or conference speaking.
Experience working in multi-site or cross-cultural engineering organizations and supporting hybrid work models.
Experience embedding or integrating AI/ML features or designing systems to integrate ML workflows is a plus.
Location
Pune, India — hybrid working model aligned with Zendesk’s local workplace policies.
Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Karnataka or Maharashtra. Please refer to the location posted on the requisition for where this role is based.
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.
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 peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.