Zendesk · 3 days ago
Principal Engineer, Data Platform Architecture
California, United States
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$214K/yr - $320K/yr
10+ years expZendesk’s mission is to make Customer Experience better for every brand and customer. They are seeking a Principal Engineer to own and shape the architecture of the Zendesk Data Platform, ensuring it is performant, reliable, secure, and cost-optimized at scale.
Customer ServiceData ManagementEnterprise SoftwareSoftwareTechnical Support
Responsibilities
Own the end-to-end architecture of the Zendesk Data Platform -- specifically the mission for ZDP to support internal analytics use-cases and for it to form the launchpad for our customer-facing analytics solutions
Ensure that ZDP supports our strategic business needs while meeting standards for scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness
Lead solution architecture for data ingestion, transformation, governance, and delivery—spanning batch, streaming, and near-real-time scenarios
Serve as a technical authority on Snowflake, including advanced features such as Snowpark, Snowpipe, Cortex etc
Advise product and engineering leads on data modeling, access policies, and query optimization strategies to enable faster analytics and resilient pipelines
Establish engineering best practices for cost monitoring, performance tuning, security, and regulatory compliance across all Data Platform services
Guide teams in making architectural trade-offs between compute frameworks (e.g., assessing migration from Spark to Snowflake-native compute), storage design, clustering strategies, and pattern optimizations
Act as a cross-functional consultant—communicating complex architecture to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, mediating divergent viewpoints, and driving alignment on long-term data platform direction
Ensure that all architectural decisions align with requirements for privacy, auditability, governance, and Zendesk’s standards for operational excellence
Provide mentorship to staff and senior engineers, cultivating a culture of technical rigor, growth, and collaboration
Qualification
Required
10+ years of experience in large-scale data engineering or analytics infrastructure roles, with at least 3 years at principal or staff-level solution architecture
Deep hands-on expertise with Snowflake, including architecture, implementation, performance optimization, and advanced features (Snowpark, Snowpipe, Cortex, Native Apps, external functions, secure sharing)
Extensive practical knowledge of OLAP warehousing concepts, modern data modeling strategies (e.g., star/snowflake, wide-table, normalized schemas), and design for cost-effective, performant analytics
Strong architectural judgment across ETL/ELT, batch and streaming, real-time pipelines, and data access patterns
Demonstrated ability to lead technical design reviews, drive technical alignment across multiple engineering teams, and influence data & analytics product strategy
Experience optimizing for multi-instance architectures, with a clear understanding of compliance, privacy, and data lifecycle management in a cloud platform context
Fluency in SQL and data engineering languages (Python, Java or similar)
Ability to navigate and influence in a complex, matrixed organization—translating technical depth into strategic direction for diverse stakeholders
Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and audit/compliance implications for enterprise data platforms (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA)
Preferred
Hands-on architectural leadership migrating or evolving enterprise-scale data platforms to cloud-native OLAP solutions (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc)
Experience integrating Snowflake with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
Prior experience with customer-facing analytics products and platform integration challenges
Contributions to internal or external data platform communities and thought leadership
Benefits
Bonus
Benefits
Related incentives
Company
Zendesk
Zendesk develops a customizable customer service platform for organizations.
5001-10000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Zendesk has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (50)
2024 (69)
2023 (37)
2022 (92)
2021 (93)
2020 (44)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$85.5MKey Investors
RedpointMatrixBenchmark
2022-11-22Private Equity
2022-06-24Acquired
2019-09-18Grant
Leadership Team
Mikkel Asger Svane
CEO and Co-Founder
Adrian McDermott
CTO
Recent News
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2026-01-06
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