Engineering Manager

Job description

Job Description Zendesk’s people have one goal in mind - to make the customer experience better. Our products help more than 170,000 global brands (like Discord, Calm, and Skyscanner) to make their billions of customers happy, every day. Our engineering team works at a scale that most companies only dream about, and where the challenges start to get seriously exciting. In fact, our global engineering team is one of the most widely dispersed in the world, with people across nearly every continent. This means you will get a chance to do cool things with a diverse bunch of people while working in an office that is home to some of Zendesk’s most loved products. Who are we looking for? The ideal candidate will have experience building technical teams, and driving their success while building consensus and alignment with external stakeholders outside the team. They should have previously proven success as the leader of dynamic, passionate teams that love to code and build highly scalable mission critical backend services while still being able to deliver important new initiatives that move Zendesk forward as a whole. Note: This is a hybrid role, combining remote and on-site work, requiring 3 days in the office, and relocation to Pune. Who you could be working with You’ll be part of a high-performing team responsible for building the Zendesk Platform and API strategy for the new AI era. At Zendesk, we are redefining the future of customer and employee service. As our enterprise customers build increasingly complex, AI-driven, and highly customized digital experiences, the demand for absolute flexibility has never been higher. The Zendesk AI-native Platform is at the epicenter of this evolution. We are responsible for decoupling Zendesk’s core business logic, ticketing infrastructure, and AI capability layers from the traditional user interface, transforming Zendesk into a world-class, API-first, developer-centric engine. As the Engineering Manager for this team, you won’t just be maintaining APIs; you will be architecting the foundational, high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure that powers customer service across the web, mobile apps, proprietary systems, and modern AI orchestration layers. What you’ll get to do each day • Lead a team of around 10 engineers who are building products that are critical for an "AI Integrations Platform" vision. • Instil and foster an organizational culture of inclusivity, trust, and performance while anchoring on feedback and other guiding principles • Work closely with leaders in Engineering, Product and Program Management to align on strategy and lead efforts that deliver reliable products • Work with the existing management to continually improve delivery, grow the team responsibly, and ensure team happiness. • Communicate progress and key decisions broadly within the organization. What you bring to the role • You are currently or have been in an Engineering Manager role or equivalent with experience managing one or more teams of engineers. • You have a track record of building high-performing, self-sufficient teams. This could be from hiring the right talent to mentoring & growing it internally. • You are familiar with modern industry standards and protocols such as REST, GraphQL, MCP, and A2A • You are able to control chaos by being objective and calm in situations • Experience with Large-scale cloud architecture preferably in a SaaS environment • Experience leading and working with a globally distributed engineering team. • Exceptional communication skills.  About Zendesk’s Product Development Center of Excellence in Pune Zendesk is in the exciting early stages of establishing a Product Development Center of Excellence in Pune. This center is being developed gradually to build and scale our operations with an amazing bunch of people. Our vision is to create a vibrant, innovative hub where all team members can grow and help grow the site as well. As an early hire, you will have a unique opportunity to be a pivotal part of this journey. You’ll play a key role in shaping the culture, processes, and success of our Pune site, contributing directly to the growth and maturity of our Product Development Center of Excellence. Your expertise and insights will help lay the foundation for a world-class development center, influencing the way we build and deliver products at Zendesk. Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Karnataka or Maharashtra. Please refer to the location posted on the requisition for where this role is based. 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 determine