Job Description

Senior Software Engineer (P9)

Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences, because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection.

Zendesk is establishing a world-class Research & Development centre in Pune and is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to design and build scalable, reliable systems that power AI-enabled customer experiences. In this role you’ll own meaningful components end-to-end, mentor peers, and partner with Product and Design to deliver high-impact features that help Zendesk scale.

Summary

As a Senior Software Engineer you will drive the design and delivery of medium-to-large features and services. You’ll be expected to contribute high-quality code, make strong design decisions, improve system reliability and performance, and help develop others through mentoring and technical leadership. Success means shipping customer-focused solutions with strong operational readiness and measurable impact.

What you’ll be doing

• Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable microservices and APIs (Java 11+, Vert.x), taking non-trivial features from proposal through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.

• Develop and integrate frontend features (TypeScript/JavaScript, React) and ensure seamless, secure API connectivity (REST, GraphQL) between frontend and backend.

• Drive architecture and system design discussions; propose pragmatic solutions that balance speed, scalability, long-term maintainability, and operational cost.

• Instrument systems and improve reliability: define SLOs/SLIs, lead post-incident reviews, reduce operational toil, and troubleshoot performance and scalability bottlenecks.

• Produce clear, well-tested code and maintain comprehensive automated tests, CI/CD pipelines, and maintainable documentation to ensure production readiness.

• Advocate and implement modern engineering practices: reactive programming, observability, security-by-design, performance profiling, automated deployments, and infrastructure-as-code.

• Lead code reviews, provide constructive feedback, mentor engineers, and cultivate a high-performing, learning-focused team culture.

• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, QA, DevOps/SRE, and frontend teams to align priorities, APIs, and cross-team dependencies and to deliver smooth user experiences.

• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and defining success criteria for new hires (first 90/180 day outcomes); influence technical strategy and roadmap for sustainable, scalable infrastructure.

What you bring to the role

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2+ years in full‑stack development and ~1+ years with senior‑level ownership of production systems.

• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and system design.

• Proficient in JavaScript/TypeScript and React for frontend development; 2+ years hands‑on backend experience in Java (preferred) or Node.js, Go, or Python.

• Proven track record delivering microservices‑based applications at scale and designing scalable, maintainable services on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Hands‑on experience with APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL), containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD, and automated testing practices.

• Practical experience with observability (metrics, logs, tracing), performance profiling, production monitoring, and incident response.

• Solid experience with relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB) and caching systems (e.g., Redis).

• Strong analytical and debugging skills; able to produce clear technical documentation and explain complex trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical audiences.

• Collaborative, growth‑minded teammate who mentors others, practices agile development, and demonstrates product empathy in engineering decisions.

Basic qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building production services.

• Experience shipping cloud-native applications and working with production monitoring and incident-response practices.

• Strong coding proficiency in at least one production language (examples: Go, Java, Python, Ruby, TypeScript) and comfortable in a Linux environment with Git.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building or integrating AI/ML-driven features or data-driven systems in production.

• Solid background in distributed systems, performance optimization, and capacity planning.

• Familiarity with infrastructure as code, service meshes, and modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger/Zipkin, Open Telemetry).

• Track record of mentoring engineers and contributing to hiring and technical onboarding.

• Open-source contributions, relevant side projects, or published technical writing are a plus.

Location

Pune, India — hybrid working model aligned with Zendesk’s local workplace policies.

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 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 peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.