Description
Job Overview
We're looking for an experienced Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our growing Platform engineering team in Pune, India. You'll work in a collaborative Agile environment, driving innovations in data infrastructure that powers advanced analytics and lays the foundation for AI and machine learning integration across Zendesk's data platform.
About the Team
We're a newly formed Data Platform Team dedicated to developing and maintaining Zendesk's data platform that powers next-generation reporting and analytics across the product portfolio. As a Staff Data Platform Engineer, you'll design and develop advanced data infrastructure for the Zendesk Data Platform.
Data is at the heart of Zendesk's business – this is a high-impact, high-ownership role with broad technical and organizational influence.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and roadmap:
+ Define and evolve the end-to-end data platform architecture across ingestion, transformation, storage, and governance. + Establish standardized data contracts, schemas, documentation, and tooling to improve consistency and reduce time-to-data for analytics and product teams. + Lead build-vs-buy evaluations and pilot new technologies to improve reliability, speed, or cost.
- Deliver platform capabilities at scale:
+ Design and deliver secure, highly-available data services and pipelines handling large-scale, mission-critical workloads. + Own, operate, and scale our core orchestration platform (Astronomer / Apache Airflow), optimizing performance, deployment workflows, and infrastructure costs.
- Raise the engineering bar:
+ Define standards for data modeling, testing (unit/integration/contract), CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and code quality; champion reproducibility and reliability. + Conduct deep root cause analyses; drive systemic fixes that improve resilience and developer experience.
Requirements
Basic Qualifications
- 10+ years of total software/data engineering background, with 3+ years dedicated to Platform Engineering or Data Infrastructure.
- 3+ years leading complex, cross-team architecture and infrastructure initiatives at a Staff level.
- Hands-on technical expertise designing, provisioning, and managing cloud environments on public clouds like AWS, GCP, Azure (primarily AWS).
- Experience with infrastructure automation tools like Terraform, CloudFormation (primarily Terraform).
- Proven track record designing and automating robust CI/CD pipelines using tools like Github Actions, Jenkins (primarily Github Actions).
- Intermediate-level experience with at least one of the programming languages: Python, Go, Java, Scala (primarily Python).
- Working knowledge of Docker.
- Intermediate-level experience with SQL.
- Experience implementing monitoring and observability frameworks (preferably for data pipelines).
- Strong communication skills, both written and verbal – you'll collaborate closely with people in multiple time zones.
- Ability to work independently and in a team, with a proactive approach to improving developer experience and engineering processes.
Preferred Qualifications
- 3+ years of experience building & maintaining scalable data infrastructure with a strong focus on automation and reliability.
- Interest / Experience in building developer-facing automation agents, internal CLI tools, or platform productivity integrations.
- Experience ‘managing’ ETL orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Dagster (primarily Airflow).
- Familiarity with dbt (Data build tool), used for building data pipelines.
- Familiarity with Data Governance and security compliance best practices.
What Our Stack Looks Like
- Infrastructure (AWS, Docker, Terraform)
- CICD (Github Actions)
- Data Pipeline and Orchestration (Snowflake, dbt, Astronomer Managed Airflow)
- Monitoring and Observability (DataDog, MonteCarlo)
Work Environment
- Hybrid: Our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration – while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.