Job Description

Senior Staff Software Engineer (Frontend)

We're looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to be the technical leader for this team. In this role, you'll define and drive the architecture, execution strategy, and long-term technical roadmap. You'll lead the development of a feature-rich system that helps company admins onboard, adopt, and manage Zendesk products with ease, while also empowering internal teams to integrate their solutions efficiently.

If you're passionate about building meaningful experiences, driving platform excellence, and creating extensible systems that serve both customers and internal teams, we'd love to have you on this journey.

This role is based in Pune and requires you to work from office at least 3 days a week

What You'll Do

Drive Engineering Excellence & Innovation

Define, drive, and own the system design, development, testing, and deployment of complex, high-quality, and highly efficient software solutions across multiple systems.
Serve as a key architect, working across multiple core development teams and disciplines to architect reliable, secure, performant, extensible, and scalable solutions for enterprise customers, setting the long-term technical direction.
Make high-impact, cross-organizational technical decisions and effectively communicate the rationale, trade-offs, and vision to engineering teams and senior stakeholders.
Establish and champion code quality, maintainability, and scalability standards, driving the adoption of best practices and modern industry standards.
Lead the evolution of Zendesk's architecture, helping to modernize our custom data platform while dramatically improving extensibility and performance and anticipating future needs.
Design and implement sophisticated event-driven architectures, ensuring robust real-time service execution tracking, automation processing, and complex rule-based workflow execution.

Collaborate & Deliver High-Impact Solutions

Work closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineering Leaders to define the technical strategy and roadmaps (1-2 years out) and drive execution.
Proactively identify, investigate, and mitigate systemic technical and delivery risks across multiple projects or teams.
Initiate and lead application improvement discussions, project initiatives, and feature design to drive continuous, large-scale enhancements.
Architect and build critical reusable components and code that drastically improve development efficiency, consistency, and time-to-market.
Lead complex code reviews, providing constructive and strategic feedback to maintain the highest engineering standards and foster architectural alignment.
Own end-to-end delivery of mission-critical features, ensuring they are shipped with exceptional quality, reliability, and performance.

Mentor, Guide, and Strengthen the Team

Provide deep technical leadership, mentoring, pairing with, and guiding senior and principal engineers to foster continuous learning, architectural understanding, and growth.
Promote a strong learning and engineering excellence culture within the team and across the organization.
Conduct in-depth, strategic research and introduce best practices, tools, and methodologies to enhance overall team efficiency, innovation, and technical capabilities.
Participate in on-call rotations after an initial training period, acting as a technical escalation point for major incidents to ensure system reliability and uptime.
Lead and refine common agile development ceremonies, contributing significantly to process improvements that impact multiple teams.
Show strategic forward-thinking (2+ years) and provide technical leadership to drive near-to-mid-term success.

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications

15+ years of experience in frontend software engineering, with extensive expertise in building high-scale, enterprise-grade SaaS or highly complex web applications.
12+ years of experience working with JavaScript and TypeScript, as well as modern frameworks like React and Redux at an architectural level.
Deep, hands-on experience with testing libraries such as Cypress, Jest, and React Testing Library, driving test strategy and automation.
Expertise working with REST and GraphQL APIs, designing and implementing highly scalable and resilient data layers.
Proven ability to autonomously own, drive, and successfully deliver multiple, highly complex, and large-scale enterprise software solutions.
Expert-level experience with version control tools, CI/CD pipelines, and modern development workflows, influencing organizational standards.
Extensive experience providing technical leadership and mentorship to teams of engineers (including other Senior/Principal Engineers) while collaborating closely with Design, Product, and Senior Engineering counterparts.
Deep expertise in multi-tenant SaaS architecture, ensuring backend and frontend scalability, data integrity, and structured service workflow extensibility in a high-volume environment.
Ability to operate with complete autonomy, driving strategic technical initiatives forward with minimal oversight.
Exceptional problem-solving, critical thinking, and systemic analysis skills.
Strong verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills in English, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

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 [HIDDEN TEXT] with your specific accommodation request.

Senior Staff Engineer (FE)