Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

Who we’re looking for:

The “Zendesk Analytics Prototyping” (ZAP) team seeks a Senior Data Engineer to support our mission of building a robust data foundation for CRM insights and improving customer support tools. As a Senior Data Engineer, you will design and implement scalable, high‑quality data solutions, collaborating closely with engineering and analytics teams to enhance Zendesk’s operations. This role offers an opportunity to grow your skills in a dynamic environment and make a measurable impact on how Zendesk leverages data.

What you’ll be doing

• Collaborate with team members to define requirements and translate them into scalable data models and pipelines.
• Develop and maintain ELT pipelines, ensuring data reliability and scalability for business reporting and analytics use cases.
• Build and optimize SQL‑based data models using dbt and other ETL tools.
• Identify and implement improvements in data delivery, processing performance, and system efficiency.
• Contribute to the team’s technical vision and bring innovative solutions to enhance data systems.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience building, maintaining, and working with data pipelines & ETL processes in big data environments.
• Extensive experience with SQL, ideally in the context of data modeling and analysis.
• Hands‑on production experience with dbt and proven knowledge in modern and classic Data Modeling (Kimball, Inmon, etc. ).
• Programming skills in Python or a similar language, with an emphasis on data transformation and automation.
• Experience with cloud columnar databases (Google Big
  Query, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake) and query authoring (SQL) as well as familiarity with a variety of databases.
• Proven experience in performance testing, capacity planning, and cost optimization for scale, complex data pipelines and systems. This includes identifying bottlenecks, ensuring scalability, and minimizing operational costs in cloud‑based data environments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Snow
  Pro Core certification or equivalent expertise.
• Familiarity with Lean/6 Sigma principles and an understanding of CRM analytics.

Our Data Stack

• ELT: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Kafka.
• BI: Tableau, Looker.
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Git
  Hub Actions.

Location & Hybrid

Senior Data Engineer – Loures, Lisboa, Portugal. This role must attend the local office part of the week; the specific office schedule will be determined by the hiring manager. Remote work for part of the week is allowed.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Zendesk is an equal‑opportunity employer. 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 refer to the Zendesk EEO policy.