Sr. Operations Manager

Zendesk is seeking an experienced and strategic leader to work directly with the Vice President of our AI Agents and Knowledge products, as well as their Product and Engineering leadership team, to accelerate our innovation.

As Sr. Operations Manager, you will lead efforts to ensure our Product Development team is collaborating efficiently and transparently with our design and engineering partners, as well as cross-functional counterparts, to remove friction and operational burdens. To start, you will be responsible for operationalizing and scaling the hiring processes of this team, to ensure we meet organizational growth and delivery targets.

This role requires expertise in SaaS Product Development and streamlining hiring practices. The ideal candidate has experience in B2B SaaS, AI/ML, or enterprise software development and has led initiatives to increase product quality and velocity.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with the VP of AI Product to operationalize and scale hiring and onboarding processes aligned with organizational growth.

• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to identify and remove inefficiencies, boosting team productivity for delivering reliable AI-driven solutions.

• Design and implement scalable workflows and communication frameworks to enable seamless cross-functional collaboration across Product, Engineering, Design, and other stakeholders.

• Lead initiatives to enhance team health and performance through regular feedback, resource planning, and capacity management.

• Support release planning and standardization to align product development cycles with business priorities.

• Work with Recruiting, HR, and leadership to identify bottlenecks and optimize the candidate experience.

• Develop and maintain hiring playbooks, scorecards, interview frameworks, and onboarding documentation tailored for AI product and engineering roles.

• Track, analyze, and report key hiring and staffing metrics (e.g., time-to-hire, quality of hire, team capacity) to the VP and leadership.

• Facilitate continuous process improvements and structured feedback loops among recruiters, hiring managers, and staff to enhance hiring outcomes and team performance.

• Act as a trusted operational partner to the VP, managing day-to-day staff coordination without direct people management responsibilities.

Qualifications

• Strong organizational and coordination skills with ability to support senior leadership in managing teams operationally.

• Proven experience operationalizing talent acquisition and hiring processes in technology or SaaS environments.

• Excellent communication skills and demonstrated ability to collaborate cross-functionally with recruiting, HR, product, and engineering partners.

• Data-driven with skills in tracking, analyzing, and reporting hiring and staffing metrics.

• Familiarity with AI product roles and engineering hiring practices beneficial.

• Experience in AI-driven SaaS or enterprise software highly desirable.

This individual contributor role offers a vital chance to operationalize hiring excellence and staff management support, enabling Zendesk’s AI product and engineering organizations to scale and innovate successfully.