Director, Platform Architecture

Zendesk • Washington, NV

3d • $317,000 - $475,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Zendesk is seeking a technically credible leader to build and lead its global contact center center-of-excellence solutions architecture team, focused on customer experience, cloud contact centers, and AI. This hands-on management role involves growing a globally distributed team, shaping technical strategy, and engaging directly with enterprise customers, senior executives, and the wider industry. The director will help customers address complex contact-center challenges and coordinate teams across Zendesk and its partner ecosystem to deliver practical, trusted solutions.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in solutions architecture, technical presales, sales engineering, or enterprise technical consulting.
• 5+ years of experience managing and developing technical, customer-facing professionals.
• 5+ years of experience in contact-center technologies, including Amazon Connect, CCaaS platforms, or contact-center integrations.
• Demonstrated hands-on AWS and Amazon Connect experience.
• Experience designing enterprise contact-center solutions and integrations across CRM, telephony, workforce management, APIs, and cloud services.
• Experience leading complex customer engagements and presenting technical recommendations to senior or C-level audiences.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong record of leading, coaching, and developing technical teams, ideally across multiple regions and time zones.
• Substantial contact-center or CCaaS knowledge, including contact-center operations, customer-service workflows, and cloud contact-center architecture.
• Experience in enterprise solutions architecture, technical presales, or a comparable customer-facing technical leadership role.
• Technical judgment to guide complex integrations and architectures across cloud services, APIs, and enterprise platforms.
• Executive presence and ability to build trust with C-level stakeholders, customers, partners, analysts, and technical teams.
• Practical, hands-on leadership style, with the ability to set direction, develop others, and personally contribute to critical customer and technical work.
• Strong communication and commercial judgment, with the ability to make sound decisions across teams and through ambiguity.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading globally distributed teams across regions and time zones.
• AWS Solutions Architect certification, Amazon Connect certification, or relevant Amazon Connect training or badges.
• Experience migrating legacy contact-center platforms to the cloud and designing voice and omnichannel workflows.
• Familiarity with integration technologies such as SIP, WebRTC, APIs, and event-driven architecture.
• Experience with contact-center AI, automation, analytics, or workforce-management capabilities.
• Coding or scripting experience for prototypes and technical validation.
• Experience speaking at industry events, briefing analysts, or representing a technical organisation publicly.

Responsibilities

• Manage, coach, and develop a globally distributed team of solutions architects; set expectations, support career growth, build leadership capability, and plan hiring, workload, and regional coverage.
• Guide architecture for solutions spanning AWS, Amazon Connect, Zendesk, enterprise systems, and AI services, setting practical standards for security, reliability, integration, and maintainability.
• Participate directly in important customer opportunities, complex technical decisions, prototypes, demonstrations, and proofs of concept, helping turn designs into credible, supportable solutions.
• Guide technical discovery and solution design with customer executives, business leaders, and technical teams; clearly explain architecture, trade-offs, risks, and business value.
• Represent the contact-center team in executive meetings, customer engagements, industry events, and briefings with industry analysts.
• Collaborate with Sales, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Services, Partner, and Marketing teams to align customer needs, solution scope, product feedback, and implementation readiness.
• Develop technical and leadership relationships with AWS and other strategic partners, and coordinate joint priorities and customer engagements.
• Prioritize work according to customer and business needs, create reusable architectures and demonstrations, and share field insights and resource needs with senior leadership.

Benefits

• The position may be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives.
• Zendesk describes a hybrid way of working that enables in-person collaboration at its offices while allowing remote work for part of the week.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director