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. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer based in Pune with a strong background in software development to help design, deliver scalable and reliable systems on our newly built Data Applications Engineering team.  This team sits under the Enterprise Data & Analytics  (EDA) organization  and owns the full stack of an internal AI-powered GTM Intelligence Platform used by 1500 employees and growing.  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. If you’re passionate about building meaningful experiences, driving platform excellence, and creating extensible systems that serve internal GTM, CX and business teams, we’d love to have you on this journey. 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. You'll work closely with the Data Engineering, Data Platform and Enterprise ML team that owns the Snowflake data warehouse, dbt models, and semantic layer — building application services directly on top of a modern data platform 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 and own the service architecture for the internal GTM Intelligence Platform — including FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes, the Snowflake Semantic Layer integration powering the NQL chatbot, and the AI agent infrastructure for agentic workflows Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable backend microservices and APIs (python, FastAPI or comparable stacks) and high-performance front-end applications (TypeScript/React/Angular), 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. 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 tr ... (truncated, view full listing at source)