Staff Software Engineer

Job Description
Zendesk is expanding its presence across the rapidly emerging AI workspace, and we're looking for a
Staff Software Engineer
to join our AI Integrations team in Melbourne. This team builds the intelligent integrations that connect Zendesk into the core AI ecosystems where enterprise employees already work including Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Slack, and Atlassian Rovo.

These integrations act as intelligent Zendesk channels, enabling customers to search knowledge, create and update tickets, extract context, and automate workflows directly inside partner AI environments. As part of this team, you'll play a central role in shaping Zendesk's position as an AI-first customer operations platform.

Who You Could Be Working With
You'll be part of a high-performing team responsible for building distributed, high scale and data-intensive integrations that extend our market-leading core SaaS product. Partnered with other SaaS providers and cloud vendors (e.g. Slack, Atlassian and AWS), our products commonly incorporate the latest technologies and features to provide cutting-edge solutions to our customers. We enjoy working with Engineers who possess a strong growth mindset, are enthusiastic at problem-solving and can demonstrate leadership qualities. Our integrations process around 10 million events per day, so you will be challenged by the global scale and complexity of these systems.

What You'll Get To Do Each Day

• Designing, developing, and deploying resilient, scalable, and secure production-grade LLM-powered integrations and services.
• Own architectural decisions across the technology stack, balancing scalability, reliability, and developer velocity as platform adoption grows.
• Shape and refine APIs in close collaboration with backend and frontend engineers to enable seamless integrations and clear data contracts.
• Mentor and guide engineers across the stack, fostering a culture of technical excellence, code quality, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product and Design to deliver features that solve real customer problems, ensuring usability, performance, and maintainability.
• Champion engineering best practices, from automated testing and CI/CD to observability and operational excellence.

What You Bring To The Role

• 8+ years of experience building and scaling modern, distributed applications across both backend and frontend stacks.
• Expertise in Go (or equivalent backend languages); experience architecting high-availability, high-scale systems.
• Strong proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript and React (or comparable frameworks); proven track record designing clean, maintainable frontend architectures.
• Demonstrated ability to work seamlessly across API boundaries, collaborating with peers to design clear, efficient integrations (REST, GraphQL, event-driven architectures).
• Proven experience building and optimizing integrations with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models)
• High bar for software quality — test automation, code reviews, documentation, and system reliability are second nature.
• Experience mentoring senior and junior engineers alike, driving technical initiatives, and leading by example.
• A pragmatic product mindset—driven to deliver value to users with empathy, initiative, and accountability.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, low-ego approach to problem solving.

Bonus points for

• Experience building integrations with popular SaaS products such as Jira, Slack, Shopify, Microsoft Teams.
• Experience with agentic workflows or automation using LLMs
• Building dev tools that boost productivity across teams

Our Tech Stack

• Our code is written primarily in Golang, JavaScript / TypeScript.
• Our frontends use frameworks including React, Redux, React Testing Library, Cypress, Jest.
• Our servers live in AWS.
• Our applications/services are deployed via Spinnaker to Kubernetes.
• Our data is stored in Aurora/MySQL, DynamoDB, and S3.

Why You'll Love Zendesk

• A mission-driven company with a strong focus on building impactful customer service products
• A vibrant, inclusive culture with a strong engineering community in Melbourne
• Flexible hybrid/remote work arrangements from our Melbourne hub
• Support for learning and development, including career growth paths and educational budgets
• Competitive compensation, benefits and generous leave policies

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.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

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 with your specific accommodation request.