PHP Tech Lead

Zendesk is a company focused on powering exceptional customer service through products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences. The role is within the Workforce Management product team, which provides AI-powered solutions for forecasting, scheduling, and agent performance tracking.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 5+ years building and operating PHP backend systems in production.
• Strong expertise with a modern PHP framework (Laravel preferred) and unit/integration testing (PHPUnit, Codeception).
• Experience designing robust REST APIs, background job processing, and scalable data access patterns.
• Deep understanding of relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) including schema design, indexing, query optimization, and migrations.
• Proven experience in cloud environments (AWS preferred), containerization (Docker), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals such as timeouts/retries, idempotency, eventual consistency, and event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar).
• Excellent communication skills, collaborative mindset, and experience mentoring engineers.
• Strong bias for pragmatic, measurable improvements and a continuous-learning mindset.

Nice to have:

• Experience with Swoole, Laravel Octane, or other PHP performance platforms.
• Familiarity with analytical/columnar stores such as ClickHouse.
• Hands-on experience with observability and incident tooling (Datadog, Sentry) and defining SLOs/SLIs.
• Experience building shared libraries, platform components, or internal tooling used across multiple teams.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Terraform, and advanced CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Spinnaker).

• Lead architecture, design, and delivery of PHP backend services (Laravel or similar), owning technical trade-offs and long-term maintainability.
• Drive the full software development lifecycle for cross-team initiatives including discovery, prototyping, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Define and enforce engineering standards such as testing, code review, CI/CD, and observability.
• Build and operate high-throughput, low-latency APIs and background systems with strong performance, resiliency, and instrumentation.
• Mentor and coach engineers across levels, run design reviews, and help grow team capabilities through documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Partner with Product, SRE, Data, and Customer Success teams to translate customer needs into technical solutions.
• Proactively reduce systemic technical debt by proposing platform improvements, refactors, and reusable components.
• Participate in recruiting and interview processes to attract and retain engineering talent.

This role requires attendance at the local office part of the week as part of a hybrid work model. The specific in-office schedule is determined by the hiring manager. Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. AI or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications in accordance with company guidelines and applicable law.