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.

We’re seeking a PHP Tech Lead (Staff Software Engineer) to join the Workforce Management product team - Zendesk’s AI-powered solution for forecasting, scheduling, and agent performance tracking. In this role you’ll design, build, and operate reliable, scalable PHP services that power customer-facing features and internal platforms. You’ll help set technical direction, raise engineering standards, and deliver systems that enable Zendesk to scale securely and efficiently.

You will play a critical role in shaping architecture and operational excellence across services—driving design and implementation decisions, mentoring engineers, and ensuring our services remain performant, resilient, and maintainable at scale.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead architecture, design, and delivery of PHP backend services (Laravel or similar), owning technical trade-offs and long‑term maintainability.

• Drive the full SDLC for cross-team initiatives: discovery, prototyping, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support.

• Define and enforce engineering standards (testing, code review, CI/CD, observability) and champion best practices across teams.

• Build and operate high‑throughput, low‑latency APIs and background systems with strong performance, resiliency, and instrumentation.

• Mentor and coach engineers across levels, run design reviews, and help grow team capabilities through documentation and knowledge sharing.

• Partner closely with Product, SRE, Data, and Customer Success to translate customer needs into pragmatic, measurable technical solutions.

• Proactively reduce systemic technical debt by proposing platform improvements, refactors, and reusable components.

• Participate in recruiting and interview processes to attract and retain top engineering talent.

What you bring to the role

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 5+ years building and operating PHP backend systems in production.

• Strong expertise with a modern PHP framework (Laravel preferred) and unit/integration testing (PHPUnit, Codeception).

• Experience designing robust REST APIs, background job processing, and scalable data access patterns.

• Deep understanding of relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL): schema design, indexing, query optimization, and migrations.

• Proven experience in cloud environments (AWS preferred), containerization (Docker), and CI/CD pipelines.

• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals (timeouts/retries, idempotency, eventual consistency) and event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar).

• Excellent communication skills, a collaborative mindset, and experience mentoring and influencing engineers across teams.

• Strong bias for pragmatic, measurable improvements and a continuous-learning mindset.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Swoole, Laravel Octane, or other PHP performance platforms.

• Familiarity with analytical/columnar stores such as ClickHouse.

• Hands-on experience with observability and incident tooling (Datadog, Sentry) and defining SLOs/SLIs.

• Experience building shared libraries, platform components, or internal tooling used across multiple teams.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Terraform, and advanced CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Spinnaker).

Our tech stack

• Backend: Go, PHP, Laravel

• Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux

• Data & APIs: PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis, REST, GraphQL Cloud & Infra: AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Spinnaker

• Monitoring & Observability: Datadog, Sentry

What You’ll Get from Us

• The opportunity to grow by tackling challenging problems and driving high-impact software initiatives.

• Collaboration with a team of passionate individuals who enjoy what they do and are always willing to help.

• Freedom to innovate – bring your ideas, experiment, and make a real impact.

• A global, collaborative work environment where you can connect with amazing people worldwide.

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... and all the benefits to support your well-being and work-life balance:

• Flexible working hours and flexible, hybrid environment (we work two days per week from our amazing Kraków office).

• Extended Stay Program (you can work up to 90 days outside of your country of jurisdiction). 

• Employment Contract with Competitive Salary and IP Tax Relief.

• Professional Development Funds and internal training to help you develop new skills and grow your career.

• Premium medical insurance (including dental & physiotherapy) plus private life insurance.

• Well-being package (incl. Employee Assistance Program and Mental Health Support as well as Additional Days Off).

• Family-Forming support: 16 weeks of paid paternity leave and inclusive fertility and hormonal health benefits via Carrot Fertility.

• Competitive benefits package designed to support your lifestyle - including access to MyBenefit platform with multiple MultiSport Card Options. 

• Long-Term Incentives: LTIP Bonus as well as Recharge Leave - 4 weeks of paid leave following 5 years of continuous service. 

• … and all the in-office perks such as lunches, massage sessions, specialty coffee etc.

The Poland annualized base salary range for this position is zł304,000.00-zł456,000.00. Please note that while the salary range represents the minimum and maximum base salary rate for this position, the actual compensation offered will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other relevant factors. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives that will be communicated during the offer stage.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.