Director, Software Engineering

Job Description

Join us at Zendesk, where we are 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 are seeking a Director of Software Engineering, based in our San Francisco office, to lead and scale global Platform engineering teams. In this role, you’ll drive the architecture and delivery of API-first, cloud-native platform services that enable partners and customers to build intelligent, AI-powered experiences at scale. You will move the needle on Zendesk’s strategic goals by delivering reliable, extensible platform capabilities and connecting those capabilities to our AI and ecosystem strategies.

Location

• Primarily based in our San Francisco office. We expect frequent onsite collaboration with product, design, and leadership teams; hybrid work arrangements may be available based on team needs.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead and grow multiple scrum teams, distributed in US and APAC regions, focused on building Technology Platform products for external customers; set priorities, remove blockers, and ensure predictable delivery.

• Define technical and product-aligned platform strategy (API-first, extensibility, security, scale) and translate it into roadmaps and execution plans.

• Own architecture and engineering decisions for web services, RESTful APIs, SDKs, and integration points with internal/external ecosystems.

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Security, and AI teams to deliver features that enable AI agentic actionability and cross-system interactions.

• Mentor engineering managers and senior engineers; hire, develop, and retain top talent; establish strong team culture and engineering practices.

• Drive operational excellence (SLA/SLOs, observability, scalability, incident management, CI/CD) to maintain high availability and performance for external customers.

• Drive architectural and technology initiatives for high-throughput, low-latency, globally distributed Platform systems and services (horizontal scaling, performance tuning, resiliency, etc.)

• Stay current with, leverage, and evaluate AI tools, technologies, and protocols (Claude coding, Cursor, LLMs, embeddings, RAG, Agent frameworks, orchestration protocols) to inform product opportunities and integrations.

What you bring to the role

• Proven leader who has successfully managed multiple globally distributed scrum/Agile teams delivering platform or external-facing products.

• Deep hands-on expertise with modern web development stacks, RESTful API design, and frameworks (examples: React/TypeScript, Node/Express, Java/Spring, Go, or equivalent).

• Strong familiarity with AI tools, technologies, and integration patterns (AI coding, LLMs, RAG, vector embeddings, agent frameworks, model APIs) and their operational requirements.

• Experience designing and operating cloud-native, microservices-based architectures (Kubernetes, serverless, containerization).

• Track record of partnering with product and customer-facing teams to deliver usable, extensible APIs and SDKs.

• Excellent communicator and mentor; comfortable presenting technical strategy to executives, senior stakeholders and customers.

• Bias for data-informed decisions and strong focus on reliability, security, quality, customer health, and developer experience.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years total software engineering experience, including a minimum of 5 years leading multiple scrum teams building technology platform products for external customers.

• Hands-on experience designing and shipping RESTful APIs and web applications with one or more modern frameworks and languages.

• Demonstrated experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into production systems or enabling AI-driven products.

• Proven success operating cloud-native distributed systems at scale (Kubernetes, cloud providers, CI/CD, observability).

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior Director-level leadership in a SaaS or platform company, delivering external-facing developer platforms or partner integrations.