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.