Senior Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

Zendesk is transforming the way businesses build meaningful customer relationships. Our products help organizations deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences at scale, and our Admin Experience is central to how customers configure, manage, and get value from the Zendesk platform.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Frontend Engineer to help bring Zendesk’s Admin Experience vision to life for an AI-first future. This is a high-impact technical leadership role for someone who combines deep frontend expertise with product thinking, system design, and strong cross-functional leadership.

In this role, you will strengthen and operationalize our vision by translating high-level concepts into technically sound, scalable, and actionable frontend strategies. You will work closely with Product, Design, and Engineering to reimagine complex user journeys and deliver intuitive, intelligent, and cohesive experiences for Zendesk admins.

What You’ll Do

• Translate the Admin Experience vision into a clear end-to-end strategy focused on the frontend, architecture, roadmap, and execution plan.
• Lead major initiatives across teams and product areas while remaining hands-on with writing code.
• Partner with Product and Design to deliver intuitive, scalable, and cohesive experiences for Zendesk admins.
• Establish reusable frontend patterns, components, and platform capabilities that improve consistency and accelerate delivery.
• Identify technical risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs while balancing near-term priorities with long-term maintainability.
• Advance performance, accessibility, reliability, testing, observability, and developer experience.
• Build and maintain scalable, unified CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker) for Admin Experience and Agent Workspace to improve delivery speed and reliability.
• Drive developer productivity by optimizing build systems, testing infrastructure (PlayWright), and local development tooling.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar through technical guidance, design reviews, and 1-1 coaching.

What You Bring to the Role

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in frontend product development.
• Proven success delivering complex, enterprise-scale UI initiatives.
• Strong proficiency in Javascript or TypeScript, React, modern web standards, GraphQL, API integration, and frontend architecture.
• Deep knowledge of frontend best practices, including accessibility, performance, testing, and reliability.
• Ability to translate ambiguous product goals into pragmatic execution plans.
• Experience leading cross-functional initiatives from discovery through to delivery
• Ability to influence without direct authority, align teams, and communicate effectively with senior leaders.
• Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience leading major transformations or redesigns of existing user experiences, particularly to make them AI-first.
• Experience building enterprise SaaS products, configuration tools, or complex operational experiences.
• Familiarity with AI interaction patterns, including agents, recommendations, automation, conversational interfaces, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
  

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.