Job Overview
Zendesk’s mission is to make Customer Experience better for every brand, every customer, every day. Data and analytics drive that vision, delivering actionable insights to more than 125,000 global brands that run on Zendesk and to internal teams.
Responsibilities
Act as the bridge between the ZAP team and Zendesk’s customer‑facing analytics application team, driving joint architectural alignment on data assets, leading design reviews, mediating divergent viewpoints, translating complex choices for both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, and shaping the long‑term roadmap of ZAP’s data products to support Zendesk’s customer‑facing analytics strategy.
Set the design patterns for ingestion, modelling, transformation, governance, and consumption, balancing trade‑offs for scale, reliability, cost, and time‑to‑insight based on the needs of customer‑facing reporting.
Stay hands‑on by building and reviewing high‑leverage pipelines and curated datasets in Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and Terraform, ensuring production code meets the highest standards for external customers.
Lead ZAP’s transition to an AI‑first operating model, translating new AI capabilities into reliable, repeatable team practices.
Establish engineering best practice for ZAP, influencing the broader organization—codifying patterns, embedding them in CI pipelines, reusing across pipelines and AI skills, and upholding standards required for data shipped to external customers.
Mentor staff and senior engineers across data engineering and data science, growing the technical depth of the team in both disciplines.
Qualifications
10+ years in large‑scale data engineering or analytics infrastructure, with at least 3 years at principal or staff level and a clear record of architectural ownership.
Deep hands‑on expertise with Snowflake, including architecture, performance optimisation, and advanced features such as Snowpark, Snowpipe, Cortex, native apps, external functions, and secure sharing.
Production fluency with the modern analytics stack—dbt, Airflow, Apache Spark, Iceberg, Terraform, GitHub Actions—with strong opinions on when to use each.
Extensive knowledge of OLAP warehousing and data modelling (Kimball, Inmon, wide‑table, normalised) and the ability to choose the appropriate model for cost‑effective, performant analytics at scale.
Strong architectural judgement across ETL/ELT, batch and streaming, real‑time pipelines, and data access patterns.
SQL fluency and proficiency in at least one production‑grade programming language (Python preferred; Go, Java, or Scala welcome).
Demonstrated ability to lead technical design reviews, drive alignment across multiple engineering teams, and partner as an equal with other tech leaders.
A bias for shipping, clarity, and proactive problem‑solving in ambiguous problem spaces, with the discipline to document and communicate decisions effectively.
Preferred Qualifications
Hands‑on architectural leadership migrating or evolving enterprise data platforms to cloud‑native OLAP (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
SnowPro Core certification or equivalent demonstrable depth.
Experience with embedded / customer‑facing analytics delivery technologies and an understanding of how warehouse‑side modelling choices shape the customer experience.
Experience integrating Snowflake with event‑driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
Experience building or operating an AI‑augmented engineering practice—agentic IDE workflows, prompt/skill engineering, evaluation design, and treating AI artefacts as production code.
Familiarity with CRM analytics and Lean / Six Sigma principles.
Contributions to internal or external data platform communities and a habit of thought leadership.
Technical Stack
ELT: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Kafka
BI: Zendesk proprietary application, Looker
Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions
Equal Opportunity Employment
Zendesk is an equal‑opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive workplace and consider applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, veteran or military status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights, please contact our HR team. Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans. If you need an accommodation to participate in the application process, please email peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your request.
#J-18808-Ljbffr