Principal Engineer

Job Description Principal Software Engineer (P6) 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. We’re establishing a world-class Research & Development centre in Pune and are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to lead technical direction for high-impact platform and product initiatives. In this role you’ll design and deliver large-scale systems, influence cross-team architecture, and mentor senior engineers so Zendesk can scale reliably while embedding AI-enabled innovation into our customer experience. Summary As a Principal Software Engineer you will own large, cross-cutting technical areas and drive architectural decisions that affect multiple teams and products. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, SRE, and Engineering leaders to define roadmaps, reduce delivery risk, and deliver scalable, secure, and highly available systems. You will also mentor senior engineers and help grow technical leadership across the organization. What you’ll be doing Own and drive architecture for complex systems or platform capabilities that serve multiple product teams; define APIs, interfaces, and abstractions that enable scale and reuse. Lead end-to-end delivery of large features and platform initiatives: design, implementation, testing, rollout, and operational readiness. Set technical direction and standards: guide design reviews, influence roadmap trade-offs, and promote engineering excellence across teams. Champion an “AI-First” mindset: guide teams to thoughtfully integrate AI into product features and internal workflows to deliver purposeful, high-value automation and innovation. Improve reliability and resilience: define SLOs/SLIs, lead incident retrospectives, reduce operational toil, and advance disaster recovery readiness. Mentor senior engineers, staff-level contributors, and architects; develop technical talents and raise overall engineering craft. Collaborate with globally distributed cross-functional partners (Product, Design, Security, SRE, Program Management) to balance business value, risk mitigation, and technical debt. Advocate for and implement scalable observability, testing, CI/CD, and secure engineering practices. What you bring to the role Technical authority and depth: you have a proven history of designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems with measurable impact. AI-first perspective: you can identify high-leverage opportunities for responsible AI adoption, guiding teams to integrate ML/AI where it delivers clear product or operational value. Systems and architectural thinking: strong skills in system design, data consistency models, performance and capacity planning, and trade-off analysis. Cross-team influence: experience aligning multiple teams and stakeholders on technical strategy, standards, and roadmaps without direct reporting authority. Coaching and mentorship orientation: you actively develop other senior engineers and technical leaders through feedback, code/design reviews, and role modeling. Product empathy and pragmatism: you balance speed, maintainability, and user outcomes, making pragmatic decisions that serve customers and the business. Operational excellence mindset: you prioritize observability, reliability, incident readiness, and measurable SLAs/SLOs. Clear communicator and collaborator: you present technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences, and you build trust across Product, Security, and Business teams. Required qualifications Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 10 years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of large production systems. 4 years in senior technical leade ... (truncated, view full listing at source)