Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Zendesk is a service-first CRM company that builds powerful, customizable software designed to improve customer relations. At Zendesk, we encourage growth and innovation, and we believe in giving back to the communities we call home.

The Zendesk Search Infrastructure team is looking for a full time remote position for a curious backend engineer with an interest in operating large systems at scale. Our mission is to build, manage, and scale the Search infrastructure at Zendesk— a combination of self managed clusters and AWS managed services.

Our ideal candidate is someone with first-hand experience debugging and fine tuning on both the application layer and the system layer. If you have a proven Unix sysadmin background--and do not mind participating in 24x7 support--we would love the opportunity to talk with you. Come help us further improve our infrastructure automation so that we can continue to grow with Zendesk and our customers!

What you will enjoy doing every day:

• Stay on top of new cloud services, and evaluate whether cloud-native alternatives can replace our stack components. Continue to strive toward a fully automated infrastructure.
• Evaluate new instances to resolve the best price point as we work with our provider on long term pricing
• Continue to enhance the tools we use daily to control our clusters
• Work closely with product management when new features are being considered by being an advocate for not impacting performance of existing APIs

What you bring to the role:

• Extensive background in building, scaling, and operating large backend infrastructures
• Proven experience with infrastructure as a code. We rely on Python, Bash, Ruby, and sometimes Java, to get our job done. An ability to review and understand an unfamiliar language would be preferred.
• A passion for graphs and metrics, and an understanding of why infrastructure monitoring and alerting is a multifaceted and dynamic process. Familiarity with Datadog is a plus, but we expect that any candidate has a solid grasp on metric based monitoring.
• Understanding the challenges and advantages with maintaining immutable infrastructure
• Recent experience as a full-stack software developer: working in an agile and dynamic development environment making use of continuous delivery and test driven development.
• Experience with storage systems like Redis, DynamoDB, and S3
• A strong experience with Elasticsearch internals. You need to understand the significance of indices, shards, and performance
• A solid understanding of Unix and/or Linux. While we aren't expecting that you can trace the origin of every packet using tcpdump, we will count on you being able to use command line tools to debug issues when application logs are not sufficient.

Nice to have:

• Experience with Ruby on Rails and/or other web frameworks
• Experience with agile development processes, working in a fast-paced environment with continuous integration.
• Familiarity with technologies like Kafka, Riak
• Experience in making contributions to publicly shared projects, with an active presence on a platform like GitHub
• Experience with Continuous Deployment systems like Travis, Jenkins and Spinnaker
• Familiarity with other search technologies like Vespa.

#LI-WO1

#LI-REMOTE

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $140,000.00-$210,000.00. 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.

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. We advocate for digital first customer experiences—and we stick with it in our workplace. Over 5,000 employees worldwide are collaborating from kitchen tables, home offices, coworking spaces, and Zendesk workspaces to make one team.

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 rac