Senior Software Engineer (Observability)

Job Description

A hands‑on, individual-contributor role. You’ll be a technical owner who designs and builds observability foundations for cloud-native services — and for the organisation’s LLM/AI stack — helping engineering teams across EMEA get the right telemetry, runbooks, and dashboards to operate safely and efficiently.

What you’ll be doing

• Architect, build, and operate end-to-end observability for metrics, traces, and logs — including telemetry pipelines, dashboards, storage/retention policies, and alerting.

• Build LLM/AI observability primitives

• Deliver reusable instrumentation templates, SLOs/SLIs, dashboards, and alerting bundles for critical AI paths.

• Instrument services and libraries (OpenTelemetry or equivalent); provide developer-facing libraries and patterns to ensure consistent telemetry across services.

• Onboard and upskill acquired and existing EMEA teams: create playbooks, run training sessions, and enable teams to adopt observability best practices and shared tooling.

• Coordinate closely with Reliability/SRE, Platform, Security, and Cost teams to ensure telemetry is secure, privacy-compliant, cost-efficient, and scalable.

• Reduce toil by automating repetitive tasks and improving developer experience for observability (CI integrations, auto-provisioned dashboards, alert templates).

• Drive cross-team alignment on telemetry schemas and naming conventions

• Participate in on-call rotations and provide timely operational support when incidents occur.

• Influence roadmap and practises through technical proposals, design reviews, and cross-functional collaboration.

What we’re looking for (required)

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years focused on observability, SRE, or monitoring.

• Hands-on experience with observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent).

• Experience building telemetry for ML/AI systems or demonstrated understanding of model monitoring concepts (drift detection, prediction quality, inference telemetry).

• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, AWS).

• Production coding skills in at least one of: Go, Python, or Ruby — able to build instrumentation, services, and automation.

• Experience designing telemetry pipelines at scale, including retention/cost tradeoffs and data validation.

• Practical experience defining SLOs/SLIs and tuning alerting to be actionable and low-noise.

• Strong communicator — able to lead enablement, write clear playbooks, and influence cross-functional stakeholders.

• Eligibility to work in Poland.

Nice-to-have (preferred)

• Experience with modern observability tools and platforms (OpenTelemetry for ML, Jaeger, Jaeger+OTel, Seldon, MLflow, Feast).

• Experience with Datadog for APM and model telemetry at enterprise scale.

• Knowledge of data privacy and security considerations for telemetry (PII handling, encryption, retention policies).

• Prior experience onboarding acquired teams or driving cross-region enablement and training.

#LI-KS6

The Poland annualized base salary range for this position is zł257,000.00-zł385,000.00. Please note that while the salary range represents the minimum and maximum base salary rate for this position, the actual compensation offered will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other relevant factors. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives that will be communicated during the offer stage.

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 [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.