Staff Data Platform Engineer

Job Description Staff Data Platform Engineer ( DevOps-focused) What we are looking for: 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, driving innovations in data infrastructure that not only powers advanced analytics but also lays the foundation for AI and machine learning integration across Zendesk’s data platform. About the team: We are a newly formed Data Platform Team here in Pune dedicated to developing and maintaining Zendesk’s data platform that powers next‑generation reporting and analytics across the product portfolio. As a Staff Data Platform Engineer, you will work on designing and developing advanced data infrastructure that power the Zendesk Data Platform. 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 day Lead 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, implement robust observability (metrics, tracing, alerting) and incident response. Raise the engineering bar Define standards for data modeling, testing (unit/integration/contract), CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and code quality; champion reproducibility and reliability. Conduct deep root cause analyses; drive systemic fixes that improve resilience and developer experience. What you bring to the role Basic qualifications 10 years of industry experience with atleast 5 years of proven experience as a DevOps Engineer 4 years of Hands-on experience with designing and building CICD pipelines using tools like, Github Actions , Jenkins. (We primarily use Github actions) 3 years leading complex, cross-team initiatives at Senior/Staff level. Experience working with one or more public clouds, preferably AWS. Experience with infrastructure automation tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, etc. (we primarily use Terraform) A deep understanding of containers and experience with Kubernetes & Docker. Intermediate experience with at least one of the programming languages: Python, Go, Java, Scala. (we primarily use Python) Experience with developing monitoring and observability frameworks (preferably for data pipelines) Proven experience designing, building, and deploying reusable AI or automation agents/tools that can be easily adopted and maintained by other engineers and teams Familiarity with SQL A demonstrated willingness to learn and adapt to new technologies and tools. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal - you’ll be collaborating closely with people in multiple time zones. Ability to work independently and in a team, with a proactive approach to improving processes and outcomes. Preferred qualifications 3 years of experience building & maintaining scalable data infrastructure with strong focus on automation and reliability Experience with ETL orchestrators such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, etc. (we primarily use Airflow) Familiarity with dbt (Data build tool), used for building data pipelines Familiarity with Data Governance and security compliance best practices What does our stack look like Infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform) CICD (Github Actions) Data Pipeline and Orchestration (Fivetran, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow) Monitoring and Observability (DataDog, MonteCarlo) Please note that ... (truncated, view full listing at source)