Golang Tech Lead

Zendesk is a company focused on powering exceptional customer service through 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 professional software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on backend or integration engineering.
• Advanced proficiency in Go (Golang) and Go testing practices.
• Strong experience with Docker and containerized development.
• Solid experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and designing performant data models and queries.
• Practical cloud experience, preferably AWS.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code patterns (Terraform preferred).
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including eventual consistency, timeouts, retries, partitioning, and circuit breakers.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and Kafka or similar message buses at scale.
• Strong API design experience with RESTful services and third-party integrations.
• Robust automated testing practices.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience mentoring and growing engineers in an Agile environment.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with PHP and/or Laravel.
• Experience with analytical stores such as ClickHouse or columnar OLAP databases.
• Familiarity with observability and incident management tools (Datadog, Sentry).
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Spinnaker) and Kubernetes.
• Prior experience with Workforce Management platforms or related scheduling/forecasting systems.

• Own design, implementation, testing, review, and maintenance of high-quality Golang services used by millions.
• Lead full software development lifecycle for multi-developer initiatives from product discovery and architecture through delivery, monitoring, and support.
• Influence and define cross-squad technical direction, architecture, and system boundaries for mission-critical areas.
• Translate product and customer needs into scalable technical solutions alongside PMs, SREs, and customer-facing teams.
• Proactively manage technical debt, break down complex work into actionable tasks, and set standards for code quality and testing.
• Optimize system performance, capacity, reliability, and observability.
• Drive production incident resolution and root cause analysis.
• Participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding to grow a high-performing engineering team.

• This role requires attendance at the local office part of the week; specific in-office schedule to be determined by the hiring manager.
• Artificial intelligence or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications.
• Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities upon request.