Staff Software Engineer (SRE)

Job Description

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale massively distributed fault-tolerant systems. Within APAC SRE our focus is on engineering quality solutions that solve Zendesks reliability and observability needs. Additionally SREs will keep an ever-watchful eye on our systems capacity and performance.

SREs culture of diversity intellectual curiosity problem solving and openness is key to its success. Our organization brings together people with a wide variety of backgrounds experiences and perspectives. We encourage them to collaborate think big and take risks in a blame-free environment. We promote self-direction to work on meaningful projects while we also strive to create an environment that provides the support and mentorship needed to learn and grow.

About Zendesks Product Development Center of Excellence in Pune

Zendesk is in the exciting early stages of establishing a Product Development Center of Excellence in Pune. This center is being developed through a BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) model allowing us to gradually build and scale our operations with a current mix of BOT workers and full-time employees (FTEs). Our vision is to create a vibrant innovative hub where all team members will eventually transition into FTE roles.

As an early hire you will have a unique opportunity to be a pivotal part of this journey. Youll play a key role in shaping the culture processes and success of our Pune site contributing directly to the growth and maturity of our Product Development Center of Excellence. Your expertise and insights will help lay the foundation for a world-class development center influencing the way we build and deliver products at Zendesk.

What youll be doing

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of service from inception and design through to deployment operation and refinement.

• Provide and institute proven practices around reliability remediations and incident management

• Build vital and efficient tooling to lower the barrier of entrance for engineering teams to plug in and enjoy the benefits of Reliability

• Provide guidance to engineering teams reliability standards to help proactively identify and resolve issues before they become incidents

• Rapidly understand issues with our products and help teams to optimally solve customer-impacting incidents

• Architect highly reliable production-grade platforms that enhance the reliability ideology

• Analyze the shortcomings of existing systems and propose alternatives

• Mentor across teams enabling technical decisions based on proven methodologies driving towards infrastructure perfection and high availability software

Required experience:

• 7 years as a Software Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer in a technical leadership role

• The ability to lead partner and collaborate cross-functionally across an engineering organization

• Experience with Javascript Python Ruby Scala and React frameworks

• Experience architecting improving and operating reliable distributed platforms

• Experience with AWS infrastructure cloud-native software design backend systems and Kubernetes

• Experience building for and supporting a polyglot programming and datastore environment

• Enjoyment from helping others learn and improve through pairing code review tech talks etc.

Preferred requirements:

• Experience in DevOps terraform or other similar tooling experience desirable

• Application support practices and procedures for critical platforms

• Application monitoring and profiling tools (e.g. Sentry Datadog Prometheus)

• Managing applications on cloud platforms preferably AWS

• Experience using high scale telemetry systems is a plus

Tech Stack

• Our product code is both monolith and microservices written in Ruby on Rails Java Scala and Go.

• Most of our automation is written in Python or Ruby.

• We run on AWS Kubernetes Vault and Spinnaker.

• Our backends are mostly AWS Aurora with some RDS Redis Dynamo and Mongo

#LI-ESKD

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.

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 pre-employment testing or otherwise participate in the employee selection process please send an e-mail to with your specific accommodation request.