Job Description

Senior Software Engineer - Custom Data (Backend or Fullstack)

Location: USA Remote | Full-Time

Job Summary

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will play a critical role in scaling our Custom Data platform, enabling enterprise customers to model complex workflows and integrate vital business data. You will lead impactful, end-to-end projects, collaborating with product and engineering leadership to drive architectural decisions and elevate platform performance. This role is perfect for a senior-level engineer who is passionate about solving complex distributed systems problems, mentoring teammates, and shaping the long-term technical direction of a high-growth product area.

About the Team

Zendesk's flagship product, Zendesk Support, helps businesses create seamless customer experiences with powerful customization capabilities. The Custom Data team owns the data customization platform that serves as the foundation for these experiences, empowering large enterprise customers to bring their unique data into Zendesk. We are dedicated to scaling this platform to deepen data modeling capabilities and ensure enterprise-grade reliability.

What you'll be doing

• Own epic-level work end-to-end, including technical design, scoping, and quality assurance in partnership with cross-functional leadership.
• Design and deliver scalable, enterprise-grade solutions while balancing technical trade-offs across performance, cost, and reliability.
• Contribute code across the stack using Ruby, Java, React, and TypeScript to evolve existing services and build new platform capabilities.
• Champion engineering best practices, including code reviews, testing, and deployment standards across the team.
• Actively monitor platform reliability, observability, and security; drive incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Mentor junior engineers and share technical knowledge to help raise the engineering bar across the wider group.

What you bring to the role

Required

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and shipping production features in an object-oriented language such as Ruby or Java.
• Experience owning epic-level work or equivalent multi-month initiatives, including design, delivery, and operational ownership in production.
• Strong understanding of API design principles and distributed systems.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL data stores such as MySQL and DynamoDB, and a solid grasp of data modeling trade-offs at scale.
• Experience building or operating event-driven or stream-processing systems with technologies such as Kafka.
• Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve performance, scaling, and reliability issues in production systems.
• Track record of improving observability, performance, or security in systems you have owned.
• Empathy and communication skills to ensure you and those around you have a clear shared understanding of what the team is working to accomplish.
• Experience providing insightful, meaningful code review feedback to engineers on your team and beyond.
• You don't just build for AI—you build with it. You are an early adopter who embraces how LLMs and agentic workflows are transforming the engineering lifecycle. You are eager to experiment with new primitives (like MCP) and leverage AI to automate the "toil" of documentation and governance, making life better for every engineer at the company.
• Experience mentoring more junior engineers.

Preferred

• Experience working on data platforms, data integration platforms, or customer context solutions.
• Experience designing and operating systems at enterprise scale.
• Familiarity with microservice architectures and event-driven systems.
• Knowledge of cloud infrastructure and container orchestration (AWS, Kubernetes).
• Experience with cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake.
• Experience with monitoring and analysis tooling such as Datadog or Sentry.

Tech Stack

• Languages: We mainly work with Ruby, React, and TypeScript, alongside some Java.
• Storage: Data is stored in RDS MySQL, Redis, S3, ElasticSearch, and Snowflake.
• Cloud: Our platform is built on AWS.
• Infrastructure: Services are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker and Spinnaker, with Kafka for stream processing.
• Monitoring: Infrastructure health is monitored using Datadog and Sentry.

What we offer

• Full ownership and impact: Take complete responsibility for the projects you work on and see your ideas come to life.
• Collaborative and passionate team: Join a group of talented, dedicated professionals who are passionate about building great products and growing together.
• Innovative and meaningful work: Engage in challenging projects where you can contribute your own ideas and drive continuous improvements.
• Continuous learning and growth: Access opportunities to develop your skills and advance your career both professionally and personally.
• Flexible work environment: We prioritize work-life balance and offer flexibility to tailor your workday to fit your unique needs and circumstances.
• Stable and supportive culture: Be part of a modern, international company that values a strong engineering culture and long-term career stability.

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $145,000.00-$217,000.00. 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.

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.