Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

In our Krakow’s office we’re supporting Zendesk Explore, our analytics product. It is a complex business intelligence application, serving 100,000 customers, 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 then allowing them to be queried and visualised at low latency - and all that at scale!
 

Who we’re looking for

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Data Engineer to join our Explore Data & Platform team. In this role, you will play a pivotal part in supporting our mission to build insightful CRM solutions and enhance data coverage across all Zendesk products. The ideal candidate will possess a strong background in data engineering and be adept at collaborating with cross-functional teams, including Engineering, Executive, Product, Data, and Design. You will be responsible for defining requirements and translating them into scalable data models and robust data pipelines that drive our analytics and reporting initiatives. If you are passionate about leveraging data to create impactful insights and improve our product offerings, we would love to hear from you.

What you’ll be doing

• Foster strong relationships and work collaboratively with internal engineering and product teams to ensure alignment and integration of data solutions across the organization.

• Engage with partners from Engineering, Executive, Product, Data, and Design teams to understand business objectives and translate them into scalable data models and pipelines.

• Develop and maintain ELT pipelines, ensuring data reliability and scalability for business reporting and analytics use cases.

• Build and optimize SQL-based data models using dbt and other ETL tools.

• Identify and implement improvements in data delivery, processing performance, and system efficiency.

• Contribute to the team’s technical vision and bring innovative solutions to enhance data systems and improve time to market for data analytics.

What you bring to the role

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of data engineering experience building, maintaining and working with data pipelines & ETL processes in big data environments.

• Extensive experience with SQL, ideally in the context of data modeling and analysis.

• Programming skills in Python or a similar language, with an emphasis on data transformation and automation.

• Experience with cloud columnar databases (Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake), query authoring (SQL) as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases.

• Familiarity with processes supporting data transformation, data structures, metadata, dependency and workload management

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

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
   

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on production experience with dbt, and Apache Airflow

• SnowPro Core certification or equivalent Snowflake hands-on expertise.

• Proven experience in performance testing, capacity planning, and cost optimization for large-scale, complex data pipelines and systems. This includes identifying bottlenecks, ensuring scalability, and minimizing operational costs in cloud-based data environments.

Our Data Stack

• ELT (Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Kafka)
• BI (Tableau, Looker)
• Infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions)

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

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.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

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.

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 peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.