Zendesk

Senior Staff Data Engineer

Zendesk$200K — $300K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.
  • 10+ years in data engineering, data architecture, or distributed systems, with 5+ years in technical leadership roles.
  • 7+ years building and maintaining scalable data platforms.
  • 5+ years with Cloud columnar databases like Snowflake or Google BigQuery.
  • 3+ years of production experience with dbt and modern ELT pipelines.
  • Hands-on experience with AWS services and relevant data technologies including Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
  • Strong communication skills for collaboration with executives and technical teams.

Responsibilities

  • Lead large-scale data engineering projects across multiple teams.
  • Plan and deliver complex, multi-team long-term projects with external dependencies.
  • Oversee design, implementation, and operation of mission-critical systems.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally to brainstorm technical solutions.
  • Design and build end-to-end analytics solutions for critical business insights.
  • Establish engineering best practices and mentor engineers for continuous improvement.
  • Identify and implement process improvements for data delivery and automation.

Benefits

  • Mentorship opportunities and a culture of technical excellence.
  • Collaborative Agile work environment.
  • Diverse technology stack involving cutting-edge data tools.
  • Strong focus on continuous learning and practical insights into business domains.
Full Job Description
Job Description

SeniorStaff Data Engineer

Our Enterprise Data & Analytics (EDA) is looking for an experienced Senior Staff Data Engineer to lead the design, development, and scaling of our enterprise data platform. You'll work in a collaborative Agile environment using the latest engineering best practices with involvement in all aspects of the software development lifecycle.

As a Senior Staff Engineer on our EDA Engineering Team, you will be pivotal in building and supporting significant aspects of our data services and pipelines, that powers the next generation reporting and analytics platform. You'll partner with architects, engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders to ensure our data platforms are reliable, observable, secure, and governed. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of data architecture and engineering execution, influencing technical direction across multiple teams while remaining hands-on with data platforms.

What you get to do every single day:
  • Lead data engineering projects at scale in a high visibility role working across multiple teams
  • Successfully plan and deliver complex, multi-team or system, long-term projects, including ones with external dependencies
  • Owns one or more large, mission-critical systems or multiple complex, team level projects, overseeing all aspects from design through implementation and operation
  • Cross functional and team collaboration on researching and brainstorming different solutions for technical challenges we face
  • Design and build end to end analytics solutions that provide practical insights into customer 360, finance, product, sales and other key business domains; can do critical R&D, PoC, vendor evaluation
  • Establish engineering best practices and mentoring other engineers in making technical decisions on projects and foster a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning
  • Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery

What you bring to the role:

Basic Qualifications
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.
  • 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or distributed systems, with at least 5 years in technical leadership roles.
  • 7+ years of data engineering experience building, working & maintaining scalable data platforms
  • 5+ years of experience with Cloud columnar databases (Snowflake, Google BigQuery etc)
  • 3+ years of production experience with dbtand modern ELT pipelines.
  • Extensive experience working with various data technologies and tools such as Airflow, Snowflake, Fivetran, DBT, AWS, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, terraform.
  • Hands-on experience with AWS services (S3, Glue, EMR, Athena, Snowpipe, Kubernetes, Terraform).
  • Understanding of data governance, security controls, and access management.
  • Solid experience in observability, alerting, and incident management for data systems.
  • Ability to work optimally in multifaceted, occasionally interrupt driven environment that includes geographically spread teams and customers
  • Intermediate experience with any of the programming language: Python, Go, Java, Scala, we use primarily Python
  • Excellent communication skills to collaborate with executives, data scientists, analysts, and engineers.
  • Ability to work closely with data scientists, analysts, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
  • Proven ability to mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the technical bar across teams.

What does our data stack looks like:
  • ELT (MYSQL CDC, Kafka, Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt Core & DBT Cloud, Astronomer, Alation, Montecarlo)
  • BI (Tableau, Looker)
  • Infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Github Actions)


The US annualized base salary range for this position is $200,000.00-$300,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.

About Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol ZEN and is a constituent of the Russell 2000 Index. The company provides a cloud-based customer support platform which allows quicker and easier interaction between businesses and customers. Zendesk has over 4,000 employees and serves 150,000 customers in 160 countries. The company was founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour.
Learn more about Zendesk
Size
2,570 employees
Market Cap
$10.3 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$218.1 million
Founded
2007
5 Year Trend
+33.7%
Revenue
$1 billion
NASDAQ

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