Description
At Zendesk, we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're looking for a technically credible leader to build and lead our global contact center, center of excellence solutions architecture team focused on customer experience, cloud contact centres, and AI.
This is a hands-on management role. You'll grow a globally distributed team while shaping technical strategy and engaging directly with enterprise customers, senior executives, and the wider industry. You'll help customers solve complex contact-centre challenges and bring teams across Zendesk and our partner ecosystem together to deliver practical, trusted solutions.
Responsibilities
- Lead and grow a global team: Manage, coach, and develop a distributed team of solutions architects. Set clear expectations, support career growth, build leadership capability, and plan hiring, workload, and regional coverage.
- Set technical direction: Guide architecture for solutions spanning AWS, Amazon Connect, Zendesk, enterprise systems, and AI services. Set practical standards for security, reliability, integration, and maintainability.
- Stay hands-on: Engage directly in important customer opportunities, complex technical decisions, prototypes, demonstrations, and proofs of concept. Help the team turn technical designs into credible, supportable solutions.
- Lead customer engagements: Guide technical discovery and solution design with customer executives, business leaders, and technical teams. Explain architecture, trade-offs, risks, and business value clearly.
- Represent the team externally: Present and represent the contact-centre team in executive meetings, customer engagements, industry events, and briefings with industry analysts.
- Collaborate across Zendesk: Work with Sales, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Services, Partner and Marketing to align customer needs, solution scope, product feedback, and implementation readiness.
- Build strong partner relationships: Develop technical and leadership relationships with AWS and other strategic partners, and coordinate joint priorities and customer engagements.
- Improve how the team operates: Prioritise work against customer and business needs, create reusable architectures and demonstrations, and share field insights and resource needs with senior leadership.
What you bring to the role
- A strong record of leading, coaching, and developing technical teams, ideally across multiple regions and time zones.
- Deep hands-on experience with AWS and Amazon Connect.
- Substantial contact-centre or CCaaS knowledge, including contact-centre operations, customer-service workflows, and cloud contact-centre architecture.
- Experience in enterprise solutions architecture, technical presales, or a comparable customer-facing technical leadership role.
- The technical judgment to guide complex integrations and architectures across cloud services, APIs, and enterprise platforms.
- Executive presence and the ability to build trust with C-level stakeholders, customers, partners, analysts, and technical teams.
- A practical, hands-on leadership style: able to set direction, develop others, and personally contribute to critical customer and technical work.
- Strong communication and commercial judgment, with the ability to make sound decisions across teams and through ambiguity.
Basic Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in solutions architecture, technical presales, sales engineering, or enterprise technical consulting.
- 5+ years of experience managing and developing technical, customer-facing professionals.
- 5+ years of experience in contact-centre technologies, including Amazon Connect, CCaaS platforms, or contact-centre integrations.
- Demonstrated hands-on AWS and Amazon Connect experience.
- Experience designing enterprise contact-centre solutions and integrations across CRM, telephony, workforce management, APIs, and cloud services.
- Experience leading complex customer engagements and presenting technical recommendations to senior or C-level audiences.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience leading globally distributed teams across regions and time zones.
- AWS Solutions Architect certification, Amazon Connect certification, or relevant Amazon Connect training or badges.
- Experience migrating legacy contact-centre platforms to the cloud and designing voice and omnichannel workflows.
- Familiarity with integration technologies such as SIP, WebRTC, APIs, and event-driven architecture.
- Experience with contact-centre AI, automation, analytics, or workforce-management capabilities.
- Coding or scripting experience for prototypes and technical validation.
- Experience speaking at industry events, briefing analysts, or representing a technical organisation publicly.
The US annualized OTE (On Target Earnings) range for this position is $317,000.00-$475,000.00 with a pay mix of 70/30 (base/commission). This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives.