Principal Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
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$ 214000 - 320000
1 Vacancy
Job Description
Job Description
Principal Software Engineer Custom Data Workflow and Approvals Platform
Location: San Francisco USA Hybrid FullTime
Lead the Future of Zendesks Core Customization and Automation Platform
Zendesks core platform powers millions of customer interactions daily enabling businesses to customize automate and streamline their workflows. As part of our commitment to delivering scalable flexible and highperforming solutions we are investing in the continued evolution of our customization and automation capabilities to better serve our global customer base.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical leader and architect for some of the most critical and highimpact components of our core Zendesk platform:
Custom Objects and Custom Data Platform Empowering businesses to model their unique data structures and workflows within Zendesk.
Automations & Triggers (Workflow Platform) Providing powerful eventdriven automation capabilities that streamline business processes.
Approvals Product Enabling structured review and approval workflows for critical requests.
This is a highly strategic handson role that requires deep architectural expertise technical leadership and crossfunctional collaboration. You will shape the technical vision drive innovation and scalability and ensure that Zendesks customization automation and workflow capabilities can scale with our largest enterprise customers.
What Youll Be Doing
Architect and Lead the Evolution of Key Platforms
Define and drive the architectural strategy for the Custom Data Workflow and Approvals platforms ensuring they are scalable performant and extensible.
Provide technical oversight for the design development and integration of Custom Objects Automations & Triggers and Approvals across Zendesks ecosystem.
Lead the modernization and scalability of existing systems while evolving the platform to support enterprisegrade customization and automation needs.
Optimize data modeling and persistence strategies ensuring efficient querying indexing and storage of custom data at scale.
Establish best practices for observability reliability and security ensuring that workflows and approvals operate seamlessly for large distributed teams.
Serve as a Strategic Technical Leader
Act as a technical mentor and guide for engineers across multiple teams fostering a culture of technical excellence.
Collaborate with Engineering Managers Product Managers and Design Leaders to align on longterm product strategy and roadmap .
Influence technical decisions across Zendesk ensuring alignment with broader engineering initiatives.
Represent Custom Data Workflow and Approvals in architectural review forums advocating for best practices and platform investments.
Solve HighScale and Complex Engineering Challenges
Tackle distributed systems challenges including highthroughput event processing transactional consistency and realtime automation .
Lead efforts to enhance system performance reliability and efficiency particularly for customers with millions of workflow executions per day.
Design solutions that enable deep integration between Custom Objects Automations Approvals and other Zendesk capabilities.
Work on multitenant SaaS challenges ensuring platform flexibility while maintaining strong data isolation and performance guarantees.
What Were Looking For
Required Qualifications
10 years of experience in software engineering with deep expertise in architecting and scaling complex hightraffic enterprise applications.
Proven experience as a Principal Engineer Staff Engineer or similar seniorlevel technical leadership role.
Strong expertise in Ruby on Rails and experience with relational databases (MySQL/Aurora).
Extensive experience building eventdriven highscale automation platforms working with technologies such as message queues pub/sub systems and workflow engines.
Experience designing and optimizing GraphQL and REST APIs ensuring performance and reliability at scale.
Deep knowledge of data modeling indexing strategies and distributed systems architecture.
Track record of technical leadership guiding teams through complex system designs migrations and modernization efforts.
Excellent ability to communicate technical decisions balancing longterm vision with pragmatic .
Passion for mentorship crossfunctional collaboration and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience working on workflow automation approvals or eventdriven platforms.
Familiarity with cloudnative architectures including microservices Kubernetes and serverless technologies.
Strong knowledge of observability logging and performance monitoring tools (e.g. DataDog OpenTelemetry).
Previous experience working on multitenant SaaS platforms with large enterprise customers.
Contributions to opensource workflow engines automation platforms or rules engines.
Tech Stack Youll Work With
Backend: Ruby Ruby on Rails MySQL
Frontend: JavaScript TypeScript React Redux GraphQL
DevOps & Monitoring: DataDog CI/CD tools
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS Kubernetes (nicetohave)
Why You Should Apply
Make a real impact. Your work will power thousands of businesses and millions of customer interactions worldwide.
Work with a toptier engineering team. We solve complex problems at a global scale.
Lead a critical initiative. Drive the modernization of Zendesks customization platform.
Work with top engineering talent. Collaborate with worldclass engineers architects and technical leaders across the company.
Enjoy flexibility. Hybridfriendly culture with strong worklife balance.
Ready to Lead the Future of Customization and Automation
Wed love to hear from you. Apply now and help shape the next generation of Zendesks Custom Data Workflow and Approvals Platform.
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 inoffice schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager
The US annualized base salary range for this position is $214000.00$320000.00. 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 inoffice 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 were 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 preemployment testing or otherwise participate in the employee selection process please send an email to with your specific accommodation request.
Required Experience:
Staff IC
Employment Type
Full-Time
