Staff Software Engineer

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. Zendesk is establishing a world-class Research & Development centre in Pune and is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help design and deliver scalable, reliable systems that power AI-augmented customer experiences. In this role you’ll own complex components end-to-end, influence architecture and technical direction, and mentor other engineers to raise the team’s technical bar and accelerate product impact. Summary As a Staff Software Engineer you will lead technical delivery for significant product areas—designing, implementing, and operating high-performance front-end applications and the backend services that power them. You’ll influence technical strategy, improve developer productivity and delivery practices, and mentor engineers to raise the technical bar across the organisation. What you’ll be doing Lead end-to-end design and delivery of large, complex features and platform components—from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring. Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable backend microservices and APIs (Java 11/Vert.x or comparable stacks) and high-performance front-end applications (TypeScript/React), ensuring secure, reliable API connectivity (REST/GraphQL). Drive architecture and system design decisions across front-end and backend domains to improve scalability, performance, maintainability, and operability. Lead front-end modernization efforts: replace legacy web app features with modern frameworks and tooling (React, Redux, TypeScript, GraphQL), document and evangelize best practices, and improve developer workflows. Champion reliability and observability: define SLOs/SLIs, lead post-incident reviews, reduce operational toil, improve runbooks, and strengthen incident response practices. Troubleshoot and resolve performance and scalability bottlenecks across the stack—profiling, diagnosing, and shipping fixes that improve user experience. Build reusable platform capabilities, APIs, and abstractions to accelerate product teams and eliminate duplicated effort . Mentor and coach engineers and tech leads: conduct design and code reviews, provide constructive feedback, create documentation and architecture diagrams, and foster a culture of continuous learning, accountability, and technical excellence. Collaborate with globally distributed cross‑functional partners (Product, Design/UX, Security, SRE, QA, Program Management) to balance business value, risk mitigation, and technical debt. Contribute to hiring—define evaluation rubrics, participate in interviews, own onboarding and early success criteria (first 90/180 days), and help grow the team’s expertise. Influence technical strategy and roadmap: prototype improvements, advocate for sustainable architecture and tooling, and participate in long-range planning. What you bring to the role Strong engineering fundamentals: system design, data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed systems thinking. Demonstrated track record of delivering large-scale production systems with measurable impact. Deep front-end expertise: excellent JavaScript/TypeScript skills, strong experience with React and its ecosystem, and solid understanding of browser internals (event loop, DOM, async). Substantial backend experience (Java 11 preferred—Vert.x a plus—or Node.js, Go, or Python) with a proven ability to design scalable, maintainable services in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure). Hands-on experience with microservices architectures, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and API design (REST/gRPC/GraphQL). Practical experience with observability (metrics, logs, t ... (truncated, view full listing at source)