Staff Software Engineer - Ruby on Rails

Zendesk’s Ticketing systems lie at the heart of all Zendesk products. This is a full-stack team responsible for making sure admins, agents and end-users alike are capable of communicating easily and safely through Zendesk’s ticketing process. 

We are seeking a skilled Staff Backend Engineer with Ruby to join our growing team in Krakow. The platform you will be working on is used daily by tens of thousands of customer support agents, including internal teams at Zendesk. As a software engineer on the team, you will work closely with the design team, other front and back end developers, and your product manager to ensure that projects are delivered on time with high quality. You’ll keep an eye out for user issues, and security vulnerabilities all while building exciting new features. You’ll help ensure the platform is flexible, reliable, and performant for enterprise customers. You’ll be part of a team built on foundations of high ownership, trust, and psychological safety. If you are passionate about building large-scale customer- and employee-service platforms, leading teams, and solving complex architectural challenges, we’d love to hear from you.

Why Zendesk?

At Zendesk, we believe that great products start with great people. Our culture thrives on collaboration, high-quality work, and rapid iteration. We’re learning-focused and value pragmatic decision-making over rigid processes. If you love leading teams that ship impactful features, foster innovation, and work on complex technical challenges at a global scale, this is the perfect opportunity.

Location

• You must be able to attend our Kraków, Poland office for part of the week. See below for our hybrid policy.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Make a complex ticketing system easy to understand and customizable to serve a multitude of customer needs.
• Deliver enterprise grade software and experience some of the challenges presented working at a global scale, working on both existing and new product features.
• Champion code ownership, standard methodologies, high quality code with corresponding test coverage, to ensure reliability and stability are kept front-of-mind.
• Participate in and/or lead all phases of the software lifecycle including discovery, technical design, defining scope with Product Managers, prototyping, implementing, code review, testing, rollout, and maintaining performance of critical features of Zendesk.
• Lead, mentor, and teach colleagues at various career levels, imparting advanced insights and promoting a culture of continuous improvement
• Troubleshoot and debug issues as they arise

What you’ll bring to the role

Please note - although this role is primarily full-stack, we will consider engineers who have a bias toward back-end or front-end engineering within the listed skillsets.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional experience designing, developing, testing, and delivering resilient production-ready solutions, focusing on ticketing automation / platform
• At least 4 years of experience with Ruby/RoR and/or React with Redux, Typescript, GraphQl/Apollo.
• Strong understanding of distributed computing principles, data architecture, and scalable system design.
• Autonomy to lead a project through its execution, while also knowing when to ask for help
• Ability to mentor and lead engineers, contributing to an enjoyable work environment that promotes teamwork
• You believe building phenomenal software is a team effort and enjoy learning together through pairing, code reviews, tech talks, etc
• Pragmatic approach to deliver outcomes often and early
• Comfortable taking ownership of all phases of software engineering: design, development, testing, deployment, and operational issues.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience.
• Experience working on Customer- and Employee-service systems.
• Experience scaling and modernizing legacy systems while maintaining business continuity.
• Experience with event-driven, distributed architecture using Kafka
• Ability to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in high-traffic applications.
• Experience with observability and logging tools such as DataDog
• Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills.
• Self-motivated with a strong propensity for action, results and continuous improvement
• Ability to thrive in high-energy, fast paced, rapidly changing environments

What you'll get in return

• Chance to grow by working with challenging problems and driving complex software projects
• Team of passionate people who enjoy what they do and are always willing to help
• We care about our employees. Zendesk encourages a high level of flexibility to adjust the workday to your needs and circumstances. Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

Tech Stack You’ll Work With

• Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, DynamoDB
• Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, Apollo, GraphQL, and a little bit of Ember.js
• DevOps & Monitoring: DataDog, CI/CD tools
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes (nice-to-have)

Why You Should Apply

• Make a real impact. Your work will power thousands of businesses and millions of customer interactions worldwide.
• Work with a top-tier engineering team. We solve complex problems at a global scale.
• Lead a critical initiative. Drive the modernization of Zendesk’s platform.
• Grow your career. We invest in leadership development, mentorship, and learning opportunities.
• Enjoy flexibility. Hybrid-friendly culture with strong work-life balance.