Staff Software Engineer - Email Platform

Job Description

About the Team

Join a nimble, high-performing team at Zendesk’s Cracow office dedicated to building and reinventing the backbone of our global email platform. As part of Cracow email team, you’ll deliver innovative solutions to one of the world’s largest SaaS customer support infrastructures—powering millions of emails each day.

The Opportunity

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Email Platform team, you’ll be at the very heart of Zendesk’s flagship product—Zendesk Support. Email remains the most critical and high-volume channel through which our customers create support tickets. We’re embarking on a multi-year journey to reimagine Zendesk’s internal platform offerings and reshape our inbound email architecture. You’ll have a front-row seat (and a steering wheel) for this transformation, bringing fresh perspectives and technical leadership to a platform critical to enterprise clients and internal teams alike.

What You'll Do

• Architect, develop, and maintain scalable, robust services in Ruby on Rails, with some UI development using React/JavaScript.

• Drive innovation and modernization as we overhaul our architecture, enrich platform capabilities, and set the standard for email at scale.

• Make key technical decisions and own solutions end-to-end—from concept to deployment and ongoing operations.

• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to scope, estimate, and deliver high-impact projects.

• Take part in operational excellence: from implementing canary deployments with Spinnaker, to incident response with incident.io, to proactive monitoring with Datadog.

• Help shape team culture through code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing, always striving for collective excellence.

• Contribute to a positive, collaborative atmosphere in our beautiful Cracow office.

What You'll Bring

Required:

• Strong experience building large-scale backend systems with Ruby on Rails.

• Solid knowledge of JavaScript and React for front-end/UI development.

• Hands-on background with relational and NoSQL databases, and with queuing/messaging systems (Kafka, SQS, or similar).

• Familiarity with modern CI/CD (Github Actions), containerization/deployment (Kubernetes on AWS), and operational tooling (Spinnaker, Datadog, incident.io).

• Ability to navigate complex system design and architectural decisions, especially in distributed platforms.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills—able to work productively with engineers, product, and design.

• Eagerness to mentor, learn, and contribute to a supportive, growth-minded team dynamic.

Nice to Have:

• Exposure to Java, Golang in production environments.

• Experience with email protocols/standards (SMTP, IMAP), Microsoft Exchange, or Office 365 APIs.

• Insights into the challenges of integrating and scaling SaaS systems.

• Interest in platform modernization and re-architecture initiatives.

Why Zendesk Cracow?

• Direct influence on a key global platform with a well-defined, ambitious 3-year roadmap.

• Dynamic, collaborative culture—where your voice is heard and your work has real impact.

• Opportunities for technical and career growth alongside smart, driven teammates.

• Access to a state-of-the-art office in the heart of Cracow, with flexible hybrid arrangements.

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The Poland annualized base salary range for this position is zł278,000.00-zł418,000.00. Please note that while the salary range represents the minimum and maximum base salary rate for this position, the actual compensation offered will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other relevant factors. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives that will be communicated during the offer stage.

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