Senior Engineering Manager, SRE

Job Description

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will help grow and lead a growing team while partnering with Product Management to craft and complete our roadmap. You will support their transformation from reactive to more proactive reliability tooling and engagements. You will own functional areas of our roadmap and build key collaborations with teams and leaders in the region.

Your role will involve ensuring the happiness and performance of the team, while keeping them passionate about impactful reliability initiatives. You will apply your leadership and technical expertise to partner with, guide, educate, enable, and empower engineering teams at Zendesk. This role is crucial as it focuses on observing and monitoring systems and services, as you can't improve what you can't measure!

What you’ll be doing

• Recruit, onboard, support, mentor and retain engineers

• Lead multiple teams that support operations, reliability tooling and reliability enablement

• Participate in crafting, developing, and evolving Reliability at scale

• Define and own the team’s roadmap in partnership with the Technical Leads and Product Manager

• Define processes that improve the delivery, risk management and cost management of the team

• Encourage innovation within the team and work on constantly improving the wellbeing and efficiency of the team

• Capable of identifying what is "right" or "wrong" and skillfully communicating and influencing requirements with customers, partners, and team members.

• Analyze the shortcomings of existing systems and propose alternatives

• This is a hybrid role, not full remote

What you bring to the role

Required:

• 5+ years of people management and experience of managing managers

• Active listening skills and empathy towards your team members while building trust and providing continuous feedback to the team

• Ability to bring the team together on common objectives and use collaborative approaches when making decisions

• Experience leading within the Reliability, Observability and/or DevOps domains

• Experience in building and scaling high performing teams

• Experience crafting, enhancing and managing large scale distributed systems

• The ability to lead, partner, and collaborate cross functionally across a large engineering organization from a centralized position

Preferred:

• Experience leading SRE, reliability or dev-ops focused teams

• Experience operating high scale telemetry systems under Kubernetes and AWS

• Growth mindset to continually improve and driven by curiosity

• Experience working with geographically distributed teams

Tech Stack

• We operate on AWS and other major cloud providers

• We support a mix of KTLO work (through our operations centre), tooling and reliability engagements with teams.

• Our code is mostly written in Ruby, Go, some Python, and is deployed on Kubernetes

• Our data stores are mainly AWS Aurora (MySQL), S3, and stream through Kafka

• No prior experience with this specific technology stack is necessary. We will provide guidance based on our expertise. However, we are looking for individuals who have experience working with distributed systems.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.