Principal Engineer

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 establishing a world-class Research & Development centre in Pune and are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to lead technical direction for high-impact platform and product initiatives. In this role you’ll design and deliver large-scale systems, influence cross-team architecture, and mentor senior engineers so Zendesk can scale reliably while embedding AI-enabled innovation into our customer experience.

Summary: As a Principal Software Engineer you will own large, cross-cutting technical areas and drive architectural decisions that affect multiple teams and products. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, SRE, and Engineering leaders to define roadmaps, reduce delivery risk, and deliver scalable, secure, and highly available systems. You will also mentor senior engineers and help grow technical leadership across the organization.

What you’ll be doing 

• Own and drive architecture for complex systems or platform capabilities that serve multiple product teams; define APIs, interfaces, and abstractions that enable scale and reuse.

• Lead end-to-end delivery of large features and platform initiatives: design, implementation, testing, rollout, and operational readiness.

• Set technical direction and standards: guide design reviews, influence roadmap trade-offs, and promote engineering excellence across teams.

• Champion an “AI-First” mindset: guide teams to thoughtfully integrate AI into product features and internal workflows to deliver purposeful, high-value automation and innovation.

• Improve reliability and resilience: define SLOs/SLIs, lead incident retrospectives, reduce operational toil, and advance disaster recovery readiness.

• Mentor senior engineers, staff-level contributors, and architects; develop technical talents and raise overall engineering craft.

• Collaborate with globally distributed cross-functional partners (Product, Design, Security, SRE, Program Management) to balance business value, risk mitigation, and technical debt.

• Roll up your sleeves and write code when circumstances demand; create POCs, implement urgent incident fixes, or prototype solutions to unblock teams and validate architecture decisions.

• Advocate for and implement scalable observability, testing, CI/CD, and secure engineering practices.

What you bring to the role

• Technical authority and depth: you have a proven history of designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems with measurable impact.

• AI-first perspective: you can identify high-leverage opportunities for responsible AI adoption, guiding teams to integrate ML/AI where it delivers clear product or operational value.

• Systems and architectural thinking: strong skills in system design, data consistency models, performance and capacity planning, and trade-off analysis.

• Cross-team influence: experience aligning multiple teams and stakeholders on technical strategy, standards, and roadmaps without direct reporting authority.

• Coaching and mentorship orientation: you actively develop other senior engineers and technical leaders through feedback, code/design reviews, and role modeling.

• Product empathy and pragmatism: you balance speed, maintainability, and user outcomes, making pragmatic decisions that serve customers and the business.

• Operational excellence mindset: you prioritize observability, reliability, incident readiness, and measurable SLAs/SLOs.

• Clear communicator and collaborator: you present technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences, and you build trust across Product, Security, and Business teams.

Required qualifications

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

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of large production systems in a SaaS or product company.

• 4+ years in senior technical leadership roles (staff or principal) with cross-team impact.

• Strong software design and system architecture skills: distributed systems, data consistency, performance and capacity planning.

• Very strong proficiency in JavaScript, Typescript, GraphQL services, and modern front-end frameworks (such as React, Angular, or Vue.js).

• Proven proficiency in one or more production languages (examples: Go, Java, Python, Ruby, TypeScript) and experience with cloud platforms (GCP/AWS/Azure).

• Experience with production monitoring, incident response, and operational excellence practices.
   

Preferred qualifications

• Experience designing or shipping AI/ML-driven features or platforms in production and integrating ML workflows into service architectures

• Deep knowledge of microservices, containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), service meshes, and infrastructure-as-code.

• Familiarity with modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) and robust CI/CD pipelines.

• Track record of influencing technical strategy across multiple teams, contributing to technical standards, and driving cross-team initiatives.

• Open-source contributions, published technical writing, or conference speaking 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.