Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

Who we’re looking for :

The ‘Zendesk Analytics Prototyping’ (ZAP) team is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to support our mission of building a robust data foundation for CRM insights and improving customer support tools. As a Senior Data Engineer, you will work on designing and implementing scalable, high-quality data solutions, collaborating closely with engineering and analytics teams to enhance Zendesk’s operations. This role offers the opportunity to grow your skills in a dynamic environment and make a measurable impact on how Zendesk leverages data.

What you’ll be doing :

Collaborate with team members to define requirements 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.

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.

Hands-on production experience with dbt, and proven knowledge in modern and classic Data Modeling - Kimball, Inmon, etc.

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.

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.

Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications :

SnowPro Core certification or equivalent hands-on expertise.

Familiarity with Lean / 6 Sigma principles and an understanding of CRM analytics.

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.