Staff Data Platform Engineer
Our Enterprise Data & Analytics (EDA) is looking for an experienced Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our growing Platform engineering team. You’ll work in a collaborative Agile environment using the latest engineering best practices with involvement in all aspects of the software development lifecycle.
As a Staff Data Platform Engineer, you will shape the strategy, architecture, and execution of Zendesk’s data platform that powers next‑generation reporting and analytics across the product portfolio. You’ll lead complex, multi-team initiatives; set technical standards for scalable, reliable data systems; and mentor senior engineers while partnering closely with Product, Security, and Analytics to deliver high-quality, compliant, and cost-efficient data products at scale.
Data is at the heart of Zendesk’s business—this is a high-impact, high-ownership role with broad technical and organizational influence.
What you get to do every single dayLead architecture and roadmap
Define and evolve the end-to-end data platform architecture across ingestion, transformation, storage and governance.
Establish standardized data contracts, schemas, documentation, and tooling that improve consistency and reduce time-to-data for analytics and product teams.
Lead build-vs-buy evaluations and pilot new technologies to improve reliability, speed, or cost.
Deliver platform capabilities at scale
Design and deliver secure, and highly-available data services and pipelines handling large-scale, mission-critical workloads.
Establish SLOs/SLIs for data pipelines, lineage, and serving layers; implement robust observability (metrics, tracing, alerting) and incident response.
Partner with Analytics, Product, and Security to translate business needs into robust, scalable data solutions and SLAs.
Tune query and pipeline performance and enforce FinOps guardrails to reduce Snowflake storage / compute spend without compromising reliability.
Raise the engineering bar
Define standards for data modeling, testing (unit/integration/contract), CI/CD, IaC, and code quality; champion reproducibility and reliability.
Advance data quality and governance (DQ checks, metadata, lineage, PII handling, RBAC) with “privacy-by-design” practices.
Conduct deep root cause analyses; drive systemic fixes that improve resilience and developer experience.
8+ years of data engineering experience building, working & maintaining scalable data infrastructure (data pipelines & ETL processes on big data environments)
3+ years leading complex, cross-team initiatives at Senior/Staff level.
3+ years of experience with Cloud columnar databases (Snowflake)
Proven experience as a CI/CD Engineer or DevOps Engineer, with a focus on data platforms and analytics (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Github Actions)
Experience with atleast 1 Cloud Platform (AWS, Google Cloud)
Proficiency in query authoring (SQL) and data processing (batch and streaming)
Intermediate experience with atleast one of the programming languages: Python, Go, Java, Scala, we use primarily Python
Experience with ETL schedulers such as Apache Airflow, AWS Glue or similar frameworks
Integration with 3rd party API SaaS applications like Salesforce, Zuora, etc
Ensure data integrity and accuracy by conducting regular data audits, identifying and resolving data quality issues, and implementing data governance best practices.
Experience performing root cause analysis on internal and external data and processes to answer specific business questions and identify opportunities for improvement.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills.
Ability to work closely with data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions. Strong documentation skills for pipeline design and data flow diagrams.
ELT (Fivetran, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow)
Infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Github Actions)
Monitoring and Observability (DataDog, MonteCarlo)
BI (Tableau, Looker)
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 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.
