Staff Data Engineer

Staff Data Engineer, Product Analytics
Zendesk is looking for a Staff Data Engineer to shape the data foundation that powers product decision‑making at scale. This high‑impact, high‑ownership role focuses on defining how product data is modeled, trusted, and leveraged across the company. You won’t just build pipelines—you will set direction. You’ll partner with Product, Analytics, and Engineering leaders to design systems and standards that enable consistent, reliable insights and drive measurable improvements in product adoption and customer retention. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in ambiguity, operates at a systems level, and wants to influence how data is used across an entire organization.

What You’ll Be Doing

Own and evolve the product analytics data architecture, including data models, semantic layers, and core datasets used across multiple teams

Define and drive standards for data modeling, metric definitions, data quality, and pipeline design across the organization

Translate ambiguous product and business problems into scalable, well‑designed data solutions

Design and build reliable, observable data pipelines and systems that support both real‑time and batch analytics use cases

Lead cross‑team initiatives to standardize schemas, align definitions, and reduce fragmentation in product data

Drive improvements in performance, scalability, and cost efficiency across the data platform

Establish best practices for data testing, monitoring, and SLAs, ensuring high trust in data systems

Provide technical leadership through mentorship, design reviews, and influencing engineering direction beyond your immediate team

Partner with product and engineering leadership to identify where data can unlock new product capabilities or insights

We expect AI to be a core part of how we build and operate data systems:

Use AI‑assisted tools to accelerate development (e.g., SQL generation, pipeline development, debugging, and documentation)

Apply strong data engineering judgment to validate, optimize, and productionize AI‑assisted outputs

Identify opportunities to incorporate AI solutions into data workflows, data products, and analytics capabilities

What You Bring To The Role

8+ years of experience in data engineering or analytics engineering, with demonstrated ownership of large‑scale data systems

Deep expertise in SQL and data modeling for analytics, including designing reusable, well‑structured datasets

Strong experience with modern data stack tools such as dbt, Airflow, and Snowflake (or equivalent)

Proven ability to design systems that balance scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency in cloud environments

Experience implementing data quality, testing, and observability frameworks

Strong system design skills and the ability to make thoughtful architectural tradeoffs

Track record of influencing technical direction across teams, not just delivering within a single team

Experience mentoring engineers and raising the overall technical bar

Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders

Where we work
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 Poland annualized base salary range for this position is zł309,000.00–zł463,000.00. 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.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, and 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 contact the Equal Employment Opportunity office. 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 View email address on click.appcast.io with your specific accommodation request.

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