Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

Staff Software Engineer - Search ETL

About the Team

Join a nimble, high-performing team at Zendesk’s Madison office dedicated to building and reinventing the backbone of our global search platform. As part of Madison’s search team, you’ll deliver innovative solutions to one of the world’s largest SaaS customer support infrastructures.

The Opportunity

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Search ETL team, you’ll be at the very heart of Zendesk’s flagship product: Zendesk Support. Zendesk’s search platform powers internal and external customer experiences, ingesting billions of data points per day. We’re embarking on a multi-year journey to reimagine Zendesk’s internal platform offerings. You’ll have a front-row seat (and a steering wheel) for this transformation, bringing fresh perspectives and technical leadership to a platform critical to enterprise clients and internal teams alike.

What You'll Do

• Develop and maintain scalable robust data delivery systems in Ruby on Rails

• Drive innovation and modernization as we overhaul our architecture, enrich platform capabilities, and set the standard for data pipelines at scale.

• Make key technical decisions and own solutions end-to-end, from concept to deployment and ongoing operations.

• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to scope, estimate, and deliver high-impact projects.

• Take part in operational excellence: from implementing canary deployments with Spinnaker, to incident response with incident.io, to proactive monitoring with Datadog.

• Help shape team culture through code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing, always striving for collective excellence.

• Contribute to a positive, collaborative atmosphere in our beautiful Madison office.

What You'll Bring

Required:

• Strong experience building large-scale, high-throughput data pipelines with Ruby.

• Experience with queuing/messaging systems (Kafka, SQS, or similar).

• Hands-on background with relational and NoSQL databases

• Familiarity with modern CI/CD (Github Actions), containerization/deployment (Kubernetes on AWS), and operational tooling (Spinnaker, Datadog, incident.io).

• Ability to navigate complex system design and architectural decisions, especially in distributed platforms.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills—able to work productively with engineers, product, and design.

• Eagerness to mentor, learn, and contribute to a supportive, growth-minded team dynamic.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with AI-driven data augmentation

• Exposure to Java in production environments.

• Insights into the challenges of integrating and scaling SaaS systems.

• Interest in platform modernization and re-architecture initiatives.

Why Zendesk?

• Direct influence on a key global platform with a well-defined, ambitious 3-year roadmap.

• Dynamic, collaborative culture where your voice is heard and your work has real impact.

• Opportunities for technical and career growth alongside smart, driven teammates.

#LI-JH1

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $164,000.00-$246,000.00. 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.

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 determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.