Senior Engineering Manager

Zendesk • Madison, WI

10d • Hybrid

About The Position

Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences, because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection. We’re seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our team focused on cloud governance, IAM, secrets management and delivery. You’ll strengthen our cloud security architecture and compliance posture through automation and close partnership with internal engineering teams. By delivering secure‑by‑default platforms and guardrails, you’ll protect the integrity of Zendesk’s systems while accelerating product engineering velocity.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in a similar people management role, with a background in hands-on, technical roles.
• Demonstrated ability to manage and govern enterprise-grade AWS environments.
• Deep familiarity with key AWS services and concepts.
• An understanding of modern DevOps methodologies: Infrastructure as Code; GitOps model of development.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills - you work effectively with Product Management, Security, CIO, and peer engineering leaders to drive outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal - you can represent your organisation's work to senior leadership and communicate trade-offs clearly.
• Prior experience working with security/compliance frameworks (SOC 2, FedRAMP, ISMAP) and supporting audits.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with tools such as Claude and Cursor, and the ability to apply them responsibly to improve speed and quality.
• Experience with non-AWS cloud providers (GCP, Azure)
• Familiarity with reporting tools like Wiz and Snowflake.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of engineers - both office-based and remote - ensuring alignment and consistent, high‑quality delivery.
• Manage a portfolio of parallel initiatives with distinct profiles: internal governance systems; audit activities; high-availability production environment infrastructure; etc.
• Partner with Corp Dev, Security, and product teams during acquisitions to assess risk and standardize access, secret storage, and policy-as-code guardrails across newly acquired infrastructure.
• Operate with excellence: monitor and improve risk and reliability; own on-call and incident response; continuously evaluate new capabilities (including AI-assisted tooling) to increase velocity safely.
• Represent your organisation's work and priorities to senior leadership, communicating progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly and concisely.
• Collaborate directly with the Senior Director of Cloud Infrastructure on the organisation roadmap, priorities, and team development.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees