Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

Senior Data Engineer – Barreiro, Setubal, Portugal

We are looking for 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.

What you bring to the role

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.
• Proven experience in performance testing, capacity planning and cost optimization for large, complex data pipelines and systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Snow
  Pro Core certification or equivalent cloud 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

Hybrid Work Model

We provide a hybrid experience that blends onsite collaboration with remote flexibility. You will need to attend our local office for part of the week; the specific office schedule will be determined by the hiring manager.

About Zendesk

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.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer and is proud of its ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, color, religion, nationality, gender, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. If you are based in the United States, click here for additional information about your EEO rights. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and veterans under applicable law.