Senior Staff Software Engineer, Group Tech Lead (Product Architect) · Zendesk
2022 — presentDublin, Ireland · at Zendesk since 2014
Technical leader for the group that owns Zendesk Talk's voice and communication infrastructure end-to-end: core telephony provider integrations, real-time transcription, streaming event buses, and the reliability of high-volume real-time traffic across regions.
- Currently building the Voice AI agent product — an AI agent that resolves customer issues autonomously over the phone, launching in 2026.
- Led technical roadmap planning and execution, aligning long-term architectural initiatives with business objectives across multiple teams.
- Spearheaded adoption of AI-driven development practices — introduced terminal-based coding agents and LLM tooling to automate routine developer workflows and expand team capacity.
- Directed integrations with third-party vendors and external AI/QA platforms, navigating high-stakes vendor negotiations through to smooth feature delivery.
- Drove cloud cost optimization: rightsized caching fleets and migrated services to more efficient environments; cut deployment bottlenecks and streamlined test pipelines.
- Defined SLIs and SLOs for the voice platform and ran error-budget oversight, using them to balance reliability investment against feature delivery and to keep customer-facing SLAs met.
- Overhauled the monitoring and alerting strategy around the RED method (rate, errors, duration), improving signal quality and cutting time-to-detection for production issues.
- Central role in Sev 1–3 incident management — led retrospectives on deployment, event-bus, and caching failures and turned them into remediation that reduced recovery time.
- Managed security and compliance work: migration of secrets to an enterprise vault, credential rotations for telephony and external integrations, and proactive vulnerability remediation.