Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Principal Software Engineer – Custom Data, Workflow, and Approvals Platform

Location: San Francisco, USA - Hybrid | Full-Time

Lead the Future of Zendesk’s Core Customization and Automation Platform

Zendesk’s core platform powers millions of customer interactions daily, enabling businesses to customize, automate, and streamline their workflows. As part of our commitment to delivering scalable, flexible, and high-performing solutions, we are investing in the continued evolution of our customization and automation capabilities to better serve our global customer base.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical leader and architect for some of the most critical and high-impact components of our core Zendesk platform:

• Custom Objects and Custom Data Platform – Empowering businesses to model their unique data structures and workflows within Zendesk.

• Automations & Triggers (Workflow Platform) – Providing powerful event-driven automation capabilities that streamline business processes.

• Approvals Product – Enabling structured review and approval workflows for critical requests.

This is a highly strategic, hands-on role that requires deep architectural expertise, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration. You will shape the technical vision, drive innovation and scalability, and ensure that Zendesk’s customization, automation, and workflow capabilities can scale with our largest enterprise customers.

What You’ll Be Doing

Architect and Lead the Evolution of Key Platforms

• Define and drive the architectural strategy for the Custom Data, Workflow, and Approvals platforms, ensuring they are scalable, performant, and extensible.

• Provide technical oversight for the design, development, and integration of Custom Objects, Automations & Triggers, and Approvals across Zendesk’s ecosystem.

• Lead the modernization and scalability of existing systems while evolving the platform to support enterprise-grade customization and automation needs.

• Optimize data modeling and persistence strategies, ensuring efficient querying, indexing, and storage of custom data at scale.

• Establish best practices for observability, reliability, and security, ensuring that workflows and approvals operate seamlessly for large, distributed teams.

Serve as a Strategic Technical Leader

• Act as a technical mentor and guide for engineers across multiple teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence.

• Collaborate with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and Design Leaders to align on long-term product strategy and roadmap execution.

• Influence technical decisions across Zendesk, ensuring alignment with broader engineering initiatives.

• Represent Custom Data, Workflow, and Approvals in architectural review forums, advocating for best practices and platform investments.

Solve High-Scale and Complex Engineering Challenges

• Tackle distributed systems challenges, including high-throughput event processing, transactional consistency, and real-time automation execution.

• Lead efforts to enhance system performance, reliability, and efficiency, particularly for customers with millions of workflow executions per day.

• Design solutions that enable deep integration between Custom Objects, Automations, Approvals, and other Zendesk capabilities.

• Work on multi-tenant SaaS challenges, ensuring platform flexibility while maintaining strong data isolation and performance guarantees.

What We’re Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with deep expertise in architecting and scaling complex, high-traffic enterprise applications.

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or similar senior-level technical leadership role.

• Strong expertise in Ruby on Rails and experience with relational databases (MySQL/Aurora).

• Extensive experience building event-driven, high-scale automation platforms, working with technologies such as message queues, pub/sub systems, and workflow engines.

• Experience designing and optimizing GraphQL and REST APIs, ensuring performance and reliability at scale.

• Deep knowledge of data modeling, indexing strategies, and distributed systems architecture.

• Track record of technical leadership, guiding teams through complex system designs, migrations, and modernization efforts.

• Excellent ability to communicate technical decisions, balancing long-term vision with pragmatic execution.

• Passion for mentorship, cross-functional collaboration, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on workflow automation, approvals, or event-driven platforms.

• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, including microservices, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies.

• Strong knowledge of observability, logging, and performance monitoring tools (e.g., DataDog, OpenTelemetry).

• Previous experience working on multi-tenant SaaS platforms with large enterprise customers.

• Contributions to open-source workflow engines, automation platforms, or rules engines.

Tech Stack You’ll Work With

• Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySQL

• Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, GraphQL

• DevOps & Monitoring: DataDog, CI/CD tools

• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes (nice-to-have)

Why You Should Apply

• Make a real impact. Your work will power thousands of businesses and millions of customer interactions worldwide.

• Work with a top-tier engineering team. We solve complex problems at a global scale.

• Lead a critical initiative. Drive the modernization of Zendesk’s customization platform.

• Work with top engineering talent. Collaborate with world-class engineers, architects, and technical leaders across the company.

• Enjoy flexibility. Hybrid-friendly culture with strong work-life balance.

Ready to Lead the Future of Customization and Automation?

We’d love to hear from you. Apply now and help shape the next generation of Zendesk’s Custom Data, Workflow, and Approvals Platform.

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 US annualized base salary range for this position is $214,000.00-$320,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.

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.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.