Staff Software Engineer - API Strategy

Job Description Who you could be working with You’ll be part of a team that holds the bar high, engineers who care deeply about the craft and are responsible for driving the overall Zendesk API strategy. As a Staff Engineer on the API Strategy team, you will be the technical visionary and hands-on lead responsible for consolidating this sprawl into a secure, observable, and unified API platform. You won't just be writing code; you’ll be defining the standards for how thousands of engineers at Zendesk define, develop, and externalize APIs, which services billions of requests every day. What you will be doing Architect the AI-Ready API Catalog: Transform our API ecosystem into an authoritative, machine-readable source of truth. You will ensure our API catalog provides the high-fidelity metadata required for human or AI agents to discover, understand, and interact with Zendesk services autonomously. Establish the Paved Road for API Integrity: Design automated guardrails within our CI/CD pipelines to ensure every endpoint is documented, linted, and secure by default. You will lead the shift toward a spec-first culture where high-quality API contracts are the natural result of the development process, not a manual chore. Modernize the API Trust Layer: Architect a unified identity and access strategy that scales across our global POD architecture and legacy acquisitions. You will define how we authorize requests in a world of Agent-to-Agent (A2A) and User-to-Agent interactions, ensuring least-privilege security without sacrificing the speed AI requires. Drive Intelligence-Driven Observability: Shift our strategy from basic logging to real-time API intelligence. You will build and own the Golden Signals (latency, error rates, saturation) needed for automated anomaly detection and to surface the Shadow APIs that create security blind spots. Define New API Primitives for AI & Data: Design and implement the next generation of API classes, including Model Context Protocol and high-throughput Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) endpoints. You will own the architecture that ensures Zendesk's API platform can handle the unique demands of LLM orchestration and massive-scale data hydration. What you bring to the role 8 years of experience building and scaling modern, distributed applications across both backend and frontend stacks. You bring a positive, can-do mindset to large-scale architectural challenges. You excel at building technical consensus across diverse product teams and enjoy the challenge of harmonizing legacy systems with future-state standards through influence and paved road tooling. A pragmatic product mindset to deliver value to users with empathy, initiative, and accountability. You are intimately familiar with the OWASP API Top 10 and how to implement runtime protection at the edge You're comfortable working with large-scale data to drive business intelligence 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. Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, low-ego approach to problem solving. 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 fu ... (truncated, view full listing at source)