Staff Software Engineer - Ruby on Rails

Job Description

Our team is responsible for the core User model for Zendesk. The team’s mission is to optimize the in-product, customer and developer experience for representing our customers’ Users at Zendesk.

This role will be joining our team based out of Melbourne Australia as our foundational engineers in Pune.

Our ideal candidate is someone who takes the lead on anything they work on and is a self-starter with projects that has the initiative to drive a project from start to finish. If you are passionate about working on applications at scale, with immediate customer impact, our friendly and supportive team is for you.

Note: This is a hybrid role, combining remote and on-site work, requiring 3 days in the office, and relocation to Pune.

What you’ll get to do each day:

• Contribute to the code at the core of Zendesk’s support product - what you write will reach millions of people each day!

• Take ownership of features and collaborate with the Tech Lead to design and implement complete solutions.

• Contribute to technical discussions and decision-making with other teams and partners across the global engineering organisation.

• Break complex features into granular pieces of work, to facilitate incremental feedback cycles.

• Prioritise and estimate work balancing feature delivery with the management of tech debt.

• Participate in and lead activities such as pairing sessions and code reviews to facilitate continuous self-improvement for the whole team.

• Work closely with our designers and product managers to help define the future of the product.

• Triage customer issues in partnership with Product Managers.

• Provide operational support for our services in Production.

• Actively look for ways to improve the observability, performance, reliability and security of our services.

What you bring to the role:

• Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails. You’ll be working on one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in the world!

• Able to drive technical decision making and collaborate with other engineers and product managers as stakeholders on the decision.

• Able to independently break down work into manageable tasks, and sequence dependencies between them.

• Solid experience with MySQL or similar. A knack for writing efficient queries and optimizing performance in high-traffic environments.

• A track record of delivering large-scale, high quality, and resilient web systems.

• Strong verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills in English - you’ll collaborate with our other product teams around the globe.

• The ability to understand and communicate sophisticated concepts in a relevant and considerate manner. Explain and reason your technical decisions clearly and effectively to engineers of different levels and non-technical partners.

• Experience solving difficult problems across multiple systems.

• Experience coaching engineers, leading brainstorming discussions, and facilitating engineers working together to make decisions in a collaborative environment.

• Ability to influence without authority, inspire and mentor others.

• A culture of learning, growth, and innovation.

• You’re comfortable jumping into unfamiliar codebases and languages.

Tech Stack:

• We primarily work in Ruby on Rails.

• Most of the team’s data is stored in MySQL and Redis.

• We occasionally work in our frontend in React, being migrated from Ember, preferring new components to be written in TypeScript.

• We occasionally work in other adjacent services in Go and Java.

• Our services connect with other services via a combination of gRPC, REST APIs, Kafka event streams, and GraphQL.

• Our services are deployed to Kubernetes using Docker via Spinnaker, running on AWS. We don’t require previous experience with these specific technologies; we’re confident you can learn as we go.

• We monitor and observe our production systems using Datadog.

About Zendesk's Product Development Center of Excellence in Pune

Zendesk is in the exciting early stages of establishing a Product Development Center of Excellence in Pune. This center is being developed through a BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) model, allowing us to gradually build and scale our operations with a current mix of BOT workers and full-time employees (FTEs). Our vision is to create a vibrant, innovative hub where all team members will eventually transition into FTE roles.

As an early hire, you will have a unique opportunity to be a pivotal part of this journey. You'll play a key role in shaping the culture, processes, and success of our Pune site, contributing directly to the growth and maturity of our Product Development Center of Excellence. Your expertise and insights will help lay the foundation for a world-class development center, influencing the way we build and deliver products at Zendesk.

Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Karnataka or Maharashtra. Please refer to the location posted on the requisition for where this role is based.

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.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here .

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.