Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

Job description

Job Description What we are looking for: Our Enterprise Data & Analytics (EDA) is looking for an experienced Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our growing Platform engineering team. You’ll work in a collaborative Agile environment, driving innovations in data infrastructure that not only powers advanced analytics but also lays the foundation for AI and machine learning integration across Zendesk’s data platform. About the team: We are a newly formed Data Platform Team here in Pune dedicated to developing and maintaining Zendesk’s data platform that powers next‑generation reporting and analytics across the product portfolio. As a Staff Data Platform Engineer, you will work on designing and developing advanced data infrastructure that power the Zendesk Data Platform. Data is at the heart of Zendesk’s business—this is a high-impact, high-ownership role with broad technical and organizational influence. What you get to do every single day • Lead architecture and roadmap • Define and evolve the end-to-end data platform architecture across ingestion, transformation, storage and governance. • Establish standardized data contracts, schemas, documentation, and tooling that improve consistency and reduce time-to-data for analytics and product teams. • Lead build-vs-buy evaluations and pilot new technologies to improve reliability, speed, or cost. • Deliver platform capabilities at scale • Design and deliver secure, and highly-available data services and pipelines handling large-scale, mission-critical workloads. • Own, operate, and scale our core orchestration platform (Astronomer / Apache Airflow), optimizing performance, deployment workflows, and infrastructure costs • Raise the engineering bar • Define standards for data modeling, testing (unit/integration/contract), CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and code quality; champion reproducibility and reliability. • Conduct deep root cause analyses; drive systemic fixes that improve resilience and developer experience. What you bring to the role Basic qualifications • 10+ years of total software/data engineering background, with 3+ years dedicated to Platform Engineering or Data Infrastructure. • 3+ years leading complex, cross-team architecture and infrastructure initiatives at a Staff level. • Hands-on technical expertise designing, provisioning, and managing cloud environments on any of the public clouds like AWS, GCP, Azure (We primarily use AWS) • Experience with infrastructure automation tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, etc. (we primarily use Terraform) • Proven track record designing and automating robust CI/CD pipelines using tools like, Github Actions , Jenkins. (We primarily use Github actions) • Intermediate level experience with at least one of the programming languages: Python, Go, Java, Scala. (we primarily use Python) • Working knowledge of Docker. • Intermediate level experience with SQL • Experience implementing monitoring and observability frameworks (preferably for data pipelines) • A demonstrated willingness to learn and adapt to new technologies and tools. • Strong communication skills, both written and verbal - you’ll be collaborating closely with people in multiple time zones. • Ability to work independently and in a team, with a proactive approach to improving developer experience and engineering processes. Preferred qualifications • 3+ years of experience building & maintaining scalable data infrastructure with strong focus on automation and reliability • Interest / Experience in building developer-facing automation agents, internal CLI tools, or platform productivity integrations. • Experience ‘managing’ ETL orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Dagster, etc. (we primarily use Airflow) • Familiarity with dbt (Data build tool), used for building data pipelines • Familiarity with Data Governance and security compliance best practices What does our stack look like • Infrastructure (AWS, Docker, Terraform) • CICD (Github Actions) • Data Pipeline and Orchestration (Snowflake, dbt, Astronomer Managed Airflow) • Monitoring and Observability (DataDog, MonteCarlo) 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 hy