Senior Engineering Manager

Job Description

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.

We’re seeking a Senior Engineering Manager (M7) to lead and grow a high-performing engineering organization that builds scalable, reliable SaaS systems used by millions of customers. In this role you’ll partner with Reliability, Product, Engineering Productivity, Design, Data, and Security to deliver AI-enabled tools/features, improve platform resilience, and accelerate developer velocity — all while developing engineering leaders and shaping technical strategy for long-term impact.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead, coach, and grow engineering teams or managers to deliver high-impact, engineering productivity, customer-facing features and platform reliability improvements.
• Contribute technically; lead by example to tackle complex engineering challenges through individual contributions and AI-assisted development.
• Maintain relationships with the wider technical community; ensure Zendesk remains at the vanguard of AI innovation and adoption of the latest technologies.
• Set technical strategy and execution plans with Reliability and Productivity, Product and Design; prioritize work to maximize velocity/customer value, operational stability, platform health, and engineering efficiency.
• Own delivery and quality: define KPIs (latency, uptime, MTTR, deployment frequency), track outcomes, and remove blockers to meet SLAs and business goals.
• Drive architecture and engineering tradeoffs for scalability, security, cost, and observability; partner with architects and senior engineers to evolve platform design.
• Recruit and retain top engineering talent; establish hiring plans, interview processes, and onboarding that scale.
• Foster a healthy engineering culture: career development, performance calibration, diversity of thought, and psychological safety.
• Partner cross-functionally to launch AI-enabled tools/features responsibly — ensuring data quality, model lifecycle considerations, cost/benefit calculations, and clear operational ownership.
• Evangelize best practices (CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, incident response) and continuous improvement across teams.
• Maintain a culture of versatility; keep the team nimble in order to address platform needs in the current environment that change quickly.

What you bring to the role

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience and 3+ years managing engineers or engineering managers (or equivalent leadership experience).
• Proven track record building and operating large-scale, distributed cloud services (SaaS) with measurable impact on business metrics.
• Proficiency contributing to, and building relationships with, open source projects.
• Strong people leadership: hiring, coaching, developing managers and senior engineers; demonstrated ability to scale teams while preserving culture.
• Experience with product partnership and roadmap planning; comfortable making tradeoffs between short-term delivery and long-term technical health.
• Data- and metrics-driven mindset: define and use KPIs to guide decisions and measure outcomes.
• Excellent communicator and influencer; able to align stakeholders across org boundaries and present tradeoffs clearly.
• Familiarity with modern engineering practices: microservices/cloud-native architectures, observability, CI/CD, security best practices, and cost optimization.
• AI literacy: comfortable using AI tools and platforms, understands how AI/ML impacts product and engineering workflows, and can lead teams to integrate AI responsibly into customer-facing systems.

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a people-management role.
• Experience hiring and scaling engineering teams (hiring plans, interviews, onboarding).
• Strong technical ownership of systems: architecture decisions, production operations, and incident response.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver cross-functional projects with measurable outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading managers (i.e., managers of managers) and scaling engineering organizations across multiple teams.
• Background in SaaS product development at scale (millions of users, multi-tenant systems).
• Familiar with ML/AI model lifecycle, MLOps considerations, or productizing ML features.
• Prior experience working in high-compliance and security-conscious environments (SOC2, GDPR, etc.).
• Track record of improving engineering productivity through automation, tooling, and process improvements.
• Experience with Ruby at enterprise scale.

AI Literacy Requirement (core expectation)

• Candidates must demonstrate practical AI literacy: able to evaluate where AI/ML adds product value, understand model lifecycle and data implications, and use AI tools to increase team productivity. This role expects you to partner with data science/ML teams, assess risks (bias, drift, privacy), and enable safe, measurable integration of AI into Zendesk products.

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.