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The position is Manager of Strategic Sourcing, Software and Engineering at Zendesk, a hybrid role located in Austin, TX; Madison, WI; or San Francisco, CA, tasked with guiding sourcing strategy and execution for software and engineering categories. The role sits within Zendesk's Global Strategic Sourcing team, which aims to maximize value and minimize risk through vendor relationships and ensuring the organization has the goods and services needed for success, covering category assessment, due diligence, RFx, contract negotiations, and vendor management. Key responsibilities include providing strategic guidance to senior leadership, developing forecasts for usage, licenses, and capacity for major contracts (e.g., AWS, Google, MongoDB, Snowflake), leading AI/LLM sourcing and optimization, and managing end-to-end sourcing with cross-functional partners, plus implementing a multi-vendor LLM strategy and maintaining a 60% forecast spend commitment with shorter renewal cycles. The candidate should have 5+ years of tech/software sourcing experience, strong negotiation and executive communication skills, the ability to build partnerships, and expertise in AI infrastructure, pricing models, hyperscaler routes, and data usage agreements for AI/LLM. The US base salary range is $116,000-$174,000 with potential bonuses/benefits; Zendesk promotes hybrid work, diversity, and inclusion, notes that AI may be used to screen applicants, and offers accommodations for applicants with disabilities.

The Engineering Manager, Authentication (Core Services) at Zendesk will own the delivery of authentication security capabilities across Zendesk products, including SSO, MFA, login flows, Admin Center security settings, OAuth/API tokens, session management, and abuse prevention, ensuring these systems are secure, reliable, and scalable. You will grow Zendesk’s access management platform by coordinating a distributed team across the US and Europe, partnering with Product, Security, Architecture, Legal, and leadership, and influencing cross‑org authentication strategy, risk posture, and operational excellence. Responsibilities include leading the Authentication organization, defining the roadmap to reduce risk and improve reliability and latency, driving operational excellence with SLAs/SLOs, observability, automated testing, incident response, postmortems, and guiding architecture decisions while planning resources across time zones. Required qualifications include 8+ years of software engineering experience with 2+ years of people management, experience building and operating high‑scale services/APIs, familiarity with identity and access management standards (SSO/SAML/OIDC, OAuth2, MFA, session/token management, abuse patterns), excellent communication skills, and an AI literacy requirement to responsibly use AI tools. Preferred qualifications cover prior IAM production scaling, data‑driven decision making, experience with backend languages and cloud platforms (Go, Java/Kotlin, Node; AWS/GCP), privacy/compliance familiarity (SOC2, ISO, GDPR), and a track record of zero‑downtime migrations; the US base salary range is $175,000-$263,000 with potential bonuses/benefits, and Zendesk supports hybrid work, diversity and inclusion, and accommodations for applicants with disabilities.