Principal Customer Architect

Join Zendesk as a Principal Customer Architect to help enterprise customers adopt AI Resolution Platform. You'll shape technical adoption strategies, guide customers through AI-enabled change, and help them realize measurable business outcomes.

What you'll be doing

• Lead technical adoption roadmaps for strategic customers, translating business priorities and technical health into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
• Build account technology plans covering architecture, Zendesk usage, technical debt, customer priorities, and adoption opportunities.
• Diagnose barriers across configuration, data, integrations, processes, operating models, and stakeholder alignment; turn findings into prioritized actions.
• Guide customers through AI and platform adoption with repeatable playbooks, standard configurations, and practical enablement.
• Lead technical discovery, whiteboarding, relevant product demonstrations, and standard sandbox configurations to make proposed outcomes tangible.
• Scope productized pilots and proofs of concept with clear success criteria, ROI logic, and a path to production adoption.
• Coordinate AI Experts, Professional Services, FDEs, Architects, and other specialists around a shared customer outcome.
• Share technical evidence that supports adoption, value realization, and expansion readiness, while tracking progress through approved systems.

What you bring to the role

• Strong technical judgment across SaaS configuration, integrations, APIs, data flows, and AI automation.
• The ability to lead structured discovery and explain complex technical ideas in clear business language, from practitioners to executives.
• Experience using adoption plans, maturity assessments, playbooks, and stakeholder alignment to make customer change stick.
• Good solution-scoping judgment: you know when a standard approach is right and when to bring in deeper technical or delivery expertise.
• Comfort with light demos and standard configuration that help customers understand what's possible without over-customizing.
• A proactive, calm approach to ambiguous customer challenges, with the ability to build trust and lead through influence.
• An AI-literate approach to your work: you can use approved AI tools responsibly, consider data, security, oversight, and measurement, and adapt as AI changes customer workflows.

Basic qualifications

• Typically 12+ years of experience in complex customer-facing technical transformation, architecture, AI automation, advisory, or a related field,or an equivalent record of impact.
• Experience owning technical adoption or transformation outcomes with enterprise customers.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical discovery, assess integrations or data flows, and recommend practical solutions.
• A track record of influencing senior stakeholders and coordinating cross-functional teams through complex change.

Benefits

• Hybrid way of working, enabling purposeful in-person connections and remote work flexibility.
• Commitment to fairness and transparency in hiring practices.
• Equal opportunity employer with ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion.