Engineering Manager

Job Description

The Opportunity :

As an Engineering Manager, you will lead the team responsible for Zendesk’s core search capabilities, which power internal and external customer experiences, ingesting billions of data points per day. You will be instrumental in a multi-year journey to reimagine Zendesk’s internal platform offerings. You will focus on scaling and supporting your team as they drive modernization, manage critical infrastructure (including Elasticsearch clusters), and set the standard for data pipelines and platform cost efficiency. Your leadership will be critical to the success of a platform supporting enterprise clients and internal teams alike.

The Location :

This is a hybrid role. Candidates must be located within commuting distance of one of our office hubs in San Francisco, CA; Austin, TX; or Madison, WI.

About the Team :

Join a high-performing leadership team at Zendesk dedicated to building, maintaining, and reinventing the backbone of our global search platform. As the Engineering Manager, you will lead and manage the Search ETL & Infrastructure team. This single, unified team owns two critical functions—Search ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and Search Infrastructure—and collectively delivers innovative, scalable, and cost-efficient solutions for one of the world’s largest SaaS customer support infrastructures

What You'll Do :

As a leader of the Search ETL and Infrastructure team, your primary responsibilities will be people management, execution, and strategy :

People Management & Team Culture :

Provide day-to-day people management, mentorship, and support their professional development.

Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and productive team culture, maintaining a high bar for engineering excellence.

Recruit, onboard, and retain high-caliber engineers for the team.

Technical Strategy & Delivery :

Set and ensure a high bar for quality; ensure the teams' output (software, architecture, infrastructure) is robust, scalable, and well-tested.

Work with Product Managers, designers, and Senior Engineers to define, scope, estimate, and deliver high-impact projects with a regular cadence.

Guide the technical vision and execution for the team's roadmap, focusing on modernizing data delivery systems, enriching platform capabilities at scale, and overseeing the strategy for Elasticsearch deployment, cluster management, operational tooling, and cost-efficiency initiatives.

Operational Excellence :

Ensure the team utilizes modern CI / CD practices (e.g., Github Actions), containerization / deployment (Kubernetes on AWS), and operational tooling (Spinnaker, Datadog, incident.io).

Maintain a strong focus on operational excellence for all critical components, including incident response and proactive monitoring.

Required Skills

Experience & Leadership :

2+ years of experience directly managing and leading software engineers.

5+ years of experience working in software development, preferably in a high-scale, production environment.

Deep understanding of software development lifecycle and comfortable leading teams to release complex features built for scale.

Technical Domain Knowledge :

Experience or strong understanding of search technologies like Elasticsearch, including deployment, scaling, and operational management.

Familiarity with large-scale, high-throughput distributed platforms and architectural decisions in this space.

Familiarity with data pipelines, queuing / messaging systems (Kafka, SQS, or similar), and a backend language like Ruby or Java.

Experience with modern CI / CD (Github Actions), containerization / deployment (Kubernetes on AWS), and operational tooling (Spinnaker, Datadog, incident.io).

Communication & Collaboration :

Highly empathetic and emotionally intelligent, able to build and nurture healthy relationships.

Ability to communicate technical and strategic roadmaps to diverse audiences, effectively leveraging data and metrics (including system health dashboards, performance indicators, and project velocity from tools like JIRA) to align stakeholders and drive informed decisions.

Not Required, but Nice Have Skills :

Prior experience working for a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company at scale.

Experience with AI-driven data augmentation or relevance initiatives.

Insights into the challenges of integrating and scaling SaaS systems.

Experience in platform modernization and re-architecture initiatives.

Our Tech Stack :

Search Engine : We use Elasticsearch as our core search engine.

Backend Services : Our services are primarily written in Ruby and Java, with Python used for infrastructure and operational scripting.

Data Storage & Streaming : We utilize AWS Aurora (MySQL) for data storage and Kafka for streaming events between services and powering our ETL pipelines.

Deployment & Infrastructure : We leverage modern practices including Kubernetes on AWS for containerization and scaling.

Developer Tooling : We maintain operational excellence using Github Actions for CI / CD, and monitoring tools like Datadog and incident.io.

#LI-JH1

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $210,000.00-$316,000.00. 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.

Hybrid : In this role, 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. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.