Golang Tech Lead

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. We’re seeking a Golang Tech Lead (Staff Software Engineer) to join the Workforce Management product team - Zendesk’s AI-powered solution for forecasting, scheduling, and agent performance tracking. In this role you’ll design and deliver scalable backend systems that power features used by thousands of customers and millions of end users, helping organizations optimize workforce efficiency through reliable, data-driven automation. You will play a critical role in shaping the technical direction and operational excellence of our WFM backend—driving architecture and implementation decisions, mentoring engineers, and ensuring our services remain fast, resilient, and maintainable at scale. What you’ll be doing: Own design, implementation, testing, review, and maintenance of high-quality Golang services used by millions. Lead full SDLC for multi-developer initiatives: from product discovery and architecture through delivery, monitoring, and support. Influence and define cross-squad technical direction, architecture, and system boundaries for mission-critical areas. Translate product and customer needs into scalable technical solutions alongside PMs, SREs, and customer-facing teams. Proactively manage technical debt, break down complex work into actionable tasks, and set standards for code quality and testing. Optimize system performance, capacity, reliability, and observability, and drive production incident resolution and RCA. Participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding to grow a high-performing engineering team. What you bring to the role: 8 years professional software engineering experience, with 5 years focused on backend or integration engineering. Advanced proficiency in Go (Golang) and Go testing practices; strong experience with Docker and containerized development. Solid experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and designing performant data models and queries. Practical cloud experience, preferably AWS, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code patterns (Terraform preferred). Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts (eventual consistency, timeouts, retries, partitioning, circuit breakers). Experience with event-driven architectures and Kafka (or similar message buses) at scale. Strong API design experience (RESTful services; third-party integrations) and robust automated testing practices. Excellent communication and collaboration skills; experience mentoring and growing engineers in an Agile environment. Preferred qualifications: Experience with PHP and/or Laravel (helpful for cross-team integrations). Experience with analytical stores such as ClickHouse or columnar OLAP databases. Familiarity with observability and incident management tools (Datadog, Sentry). Hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Spinnaker) and Kubernetes. Prior experience with Workforce Management platforms or related scheduling/forecasting systems. Our tech stack Backend: Go, PHP, Laravel Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux Data & APIs: PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis, REST, GraphQL Cloud & Infra: AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Spinnaker Monitoring & Observability: Datadog, Sentry What You’ll Get from Us The opportunity to grow by tackling challenging problems and driving high-impact software initiatives. Collaboration with a team of passionate individuals who enjoy what they do and are always willing to help. Freedom to innovate – bring your ideas, experiment, and make a real impact. A global, collaborative work environment where you can connect with amazing people worldwide. ... and all the benefits to supp ... (truncated, view full listing at source)