Senior Software Engineer

Description:

At Zendesk, we truly believe that to build great products you have to have great people. We enjoy working with other smart focused people who care about both the products and the code they write. We value collaboration and release frequently. We like and use agile processes and believe that pragmatism always triumphs over dogmatism. We all own the product/service we work on and enjoy the impact we have improving it.

We’re looking for a hardworking software engineer to help take Zendesk products to the next level in terms of functionality and integrations. You’ll be joining a team that works on our Agent Status Keeper service. Agent presence is a complex real-time problem domain that needs a robust, scalable and maintainable solution. You’ll have the skills, experience, maturity, patience and determination to work within a multi functional team to deliver high quality software to meet these needs.

We like to push well tested code early and often, then measure to confirm its adding value for the customer. We seek to solve problems for our fast growing and highly engaged customer base. Our team has a great track record of producing some of the most reliable and efficient services at Zendesk.

• Work collaboratively with a small focused team on a real-time service that needs to be robust, low latency and scalable.

• Participate in the development life-cycle including conception, design, implementation, testing, rollout and making everything run efficiently in production.

• Follow and improve our practices at every stage of development: TDD, spiking/prototyping, pairing, peer code review, design review and rapid deployment.

• Ideally, plenty of experience with Scala or Java in combination with highly scalable datastores such as DynamoDB and Kafka.

• Extensive experience building, managing and scaling both APIs and event driven distributed systems.

• Driven and highly motivated to understand complex systems, methodical in identifying and decomposing requirements.

• When working on debugging a tricky intermittent issue you won’t give up until the functionality behaves as expected, the root cause has been identified, monitoring added and an automated test has been put in place to avoid the issue reoccurring.

• A desire to whiteboard problems in a group setting and apply the scientific method to finding a pragmatic solution that is the best fit (on balance) for the identified problem space.

• Excellent communication skills, the ability to explain your views well to others and just as importantly, to actively listen to others ensuring a good discussion. You’ll also want to bash out a wiki page with a summary of the discussion and any decisions for the benefit of others. Experience working closely with teams in different geographies is desirable.

• ASK service you will be working with, uses the Akka toolkit to simplify the construction of the application on the JVM. Any experience in Akka is a bonus.

• ASK service uses a CQRS architecture. Any experience working with an application built on CQRS is a plus.

• Interest in learning technologies such as Kafka, DynamoDB, Docker/Kubernetes.

• Any knowledge and/or experience in the VOIP/telecoms or live chat areas would be useful background knowledge.