Golang Job: Senior Staff Software Engineer

At Zendesk, we get excited about building software that delivers the ultimate customer experience. Your favourite brands (like Airbnb, Uber, Slack, and Disney) use our products to engage you as a customer, and we lead the industry with beautifully simple software. And we’re constantly innovating - no, really, we can’t wait to outdo ourselves in the near future.

Zendesk Explore (https://www.zendesk.com/explore/) is our latest analytics product. It is a complex business intelligence application, serving 100,000 customers and utilising data from over 500 million Zendesk users and 40+ external data source connectors. Explore is responsible for ingesting millions of records from the Zendesk product family and allowing them to be queried and visualised at low latency - and all that at internet scale!

The Zendesk Explore Query Engine team is in charge of handling hundreds of millions of queries from Zendesk users creating reports, dashboards, and interactive discovery on the fly. We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join the mission to create v2 of our analytics data engine - one key facet of which is a proprietary transpiler mechanism to turn end user drag and drop studio based query building into highly efficient SQL for optimized execution on disparate schemas across datastores including Redshift, PostgreSQL, Redis, Apache Pinot and others. You’ll have the skills, experience, wisdom, patience, and determination to work with the team to meet our customer's needs. We have a collaborative, upbeat work ethic where you take responsibility and have fun, as well as commit to code ownership, quality and reliability.

Ongoing Explore projects:

Data Lakehouse

Deliver low latency, incremental batch data pipeline leveraging Lakehouse data management architecture to enable Zendesk Explore product move beyond Business Intelligence to Predictive Analytical system.

Real-time operational intelligence

Build near real-time analytical pipelines using Flink, Kafka, Redis & Apache Pinot to enable Zendesk Explore product deliver customer experiences intelligence in real-time to our customers.

Query Engine

Develop the core components of the Zendesk Explore query engine to support a highly concurrent, sub second latency query engine for our customer's reports, dashboards, and interactive query analytics.

What you get to do every day:

You will drive systems architecture and lead architectural implementation decisions related to our analytics data engine, working with a team of engineers to create innovative software on a large, rapidly growing and successful application focused on BI Analytics.

• You will ensure technical direction and alignment for our analytics data engine team in Explore.

• You will design and implement critical transpiler capabilities for our new analytics data engine.

• You will mentor more junior engineers and help them grow by giving relevant feedback and follow-up.

• You will provide key input and drive the technical roadmap, identifying components, issues, and solutions.

• You will help the team break larger initiatives down and deliver them iteratively.

• You will stay up-to-date with innovations and changes, both within Zendesk, and in the industry and make pragmatic recommendations on their applicability to our problem space.

What you bring to the role:

• 8+ years of distributed systems engineering experience utilizing one or more of the following: Java, Scala, Python, C++, Golang

• Extensive knowledge of database internals, query compilers, and query runtimes

• Advanced working SQL knowledge and experience working with relational databases, query authoring (SQL) as well as data modeling techniques like Kimbell dimensional modeling, Data Vault et al.

• Experience working with any OLAP engines like Apache Pinot, Apache Druid or ClickHouse

• Experience with object-oriented/object function scripting languages, preferably Scala or Java.

• Experience performing root cause analysis on internal and external data and processes to answer specific business questions and identify opportunities for improvement.

• Ability to think in a strategic manner to develop innovative product solutions, with a global mindset and able to operate effectively across regional boundaries.

• Bonus points if you build and/or use open source query optimization frameworks like Apache Calcite, Apache Spark Catalyst, Postgres Query Optimizer, etc.

• Our code is written in Ruby, Scala, Typescript.

• Our data is stored in RDS MySQL, Redis, Redshift and Aurora.

• Our services are deployed to ECS using Docker on AWS.

• Our data pipeline is using Spark (AWS EMR)

• Our real-time pipeline is using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink & Redis

• Full ownership of the projects you work on.

• What you will be doing will have a huge impact.

• Team of passionate people who love what they do.

• Exciting projects, ability to implement your own ideas and improvements.

• Opportunity to learn and grow.

• Flexible working hours.

• Professional development funds.

• Comfortable office and/or a remote setup.

• Choice of your laptop and other equipment.

• Premium Medical Insurance as well as Private Life Assurance.

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement. They give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth.

More than 150,000 paid customer accounts in over 150 countries and territories use Zendesk products. Based in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.

Interested in knowing what we do in the community? Check out the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation to learn more about how we engage with, and provide support to, our local communities.

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 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, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes. Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where Zendesk may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk’s use of your personal information.

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About Zendesk - Champions of Customer Service

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. We advocate for digital first customer experiences — and we stick with it in our workplace. Over 6,000 employees worldwide have the flexibility and trust to choose where they work. The fact is, we know great work happens anywhere. Whether you’re collaborating from your home office, a Zendesk workspace, or the kitchen table, you’re part of one team at Zendesk.

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.

For jobs in the US only: If hired, you will be required to provide proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 and will be provided with an opportunity to request an accommodation for reasons recognized by applicable law. This is a requirement of employment for jobs based in the United States.

For jobs in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Philippines and Singapore: If hired and required to work in office or in person with others as part of your job, you will be required to provide proof of full vaccination against COVID-19. Zendesk will consider exceptions for reasons recognized by applicable law. This is a requirement of employment for jobs based in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Philippines and Singapore.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.

By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes. Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where Zendesk may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk’s use of your personal information.