Information Technology Lead

Job Description

Job Title: Observability & Monitoring Lead
Location: Pune, India

Love making complex systems feel simple and reliable? We’re looking for an Observability & Monitoring Engineer who is equal parts builder and detective—someone who instruments services end-to-end, shines a light on blind spots, and turns noise into actionable signals. You’ll help us evolve a modern RunOps capability that improves reliability, reduces toil, and elevates the employee experience across Zendesk.

About Zendesk

At Zendesk, we believe outstanding customer and employee experiences start with great service and resilient platforms. We lead with empathy, innovate with purpose, and celebrate diversity and inclusion in everything we do. Join our global team and help us build an observability practice that others want to copy.

The Role: We are seeking a highly experienced Observability & Monitoring Lead with 6+ years of industry experience to spearhead our SRE and observability strategy. You will be responsible for maturing our monitoring ecosystem, driving operational excellence, and reducing system downtime through proactive detection and incident management. You will bridge the gap between engineering and operations, ensuring that observability data directly translates into improved reliability, SLA compliance, and reduced MTTR.You will design and operate the telemetry backbone for our internal platforms and business-critical applications. This role spans metrics, logs, traces, synthetics, RUM, and event correlation—instrumenting services, building dashboards, tuning alerts, and partnering with Incident/Problem/Change to drive measurable reliability outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• • Design the observability stack: Define and implement standards for metrics, logs, traces, and profiling (e.g., OpenTelemetry collectors, exporters, and context propagation).
  • Instrument what matters: Establish golden signals, SLIs/SLOs, and health checks for priority services; automate baselining and anomaly detection.
  • Build actionable visibility: Create executive and on-call views (dashboards, service health, dependency maps) for Apps, Network, Collaboration tools, HRIS, and integrations.
  • Engineer signal > noise: Develop alerting policy as code; reduce false positives; implement suppression, deduplication, and auto-
  • Security & compliance: Ensure monitoring data is handled per policy; implement role-based access and guardrails for sensitive logs/metrics
  • Incident Reduction: Develop and execute strategies to systematically reduce the volume of high-priority incidents through trend analysis and proactive stability improvements.
  • Incident Automation: Lead the engineering of automated response workflows and self-healing capabilities to minimize manual intervention and accelerate resolution times.
  • Strategy & Architecture: Design and coordinate with engineering teams for comprehensive observability strategies, including logging, metrics, and tracing across distributed systems.
  • Tooling Enhancements : End-to-end management of observability stacks (Data Dog) and its integration with ITSM tools (Ticketing Tools) and applications. Seek assistance from product and engineering team for any tool enhancement use cases to build a robust observability platform integrated with the ticketing tools.
  • Application Onboarding: Responsible and accountable for onboarding relevant observability and monitoring necessities for new applications which are onboarded and handed over to operations.
  • Incident & SLA Management: Oversee the operational lifecycle of monitoring tickets and Lead the monthly analysis and reporting of performance metrics (Eg - Mean time to detect, Mean time to restore,Mean time to Respond/Accept, First touch resolution) and ensure SLA compliance .
  • Continual Service Improvement: Liaise with technical and level 2 teams to improve and mature the current monitoring state of applications in scope.
  • Process Automation: Drive the automation of incident reporting, alert correlation rules, and "alert fatigue" reduction. Transform raw telemetry data into actionable executive insights.
  • SRE Leadership: Responsible for managing the L1 SRE Engineers who will be handling the automated monitoring incidents in day to day operations.
  • Governance & Leadership: Manage  governance calls, lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reviews, and maintain the Known Error Database (KEDB).
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with domain team leads to define SLOs/SLIs, align on capacity planning, and ensure documentation (Runbooks/HLD/LLD) is maintained to "single point of failure" (SPOF) standards.

What You Bring

• • Experience: 6+ years in Observability/SRE/Platform/Monitoring roles supporting SaaS or enterprise applications.
  • Telemetry tools: Hands-on with monitoring and logging tools.  
  • Tracing & metrics: Strong grasp of distributed tracing, RED/USE/golden signals, SLI/SLO/SLA, and error budgets.
  • Automation & code: Proficient in common languages such as Python.
  • Cloud & platforms: Experience with AWS 
  • ITSM fluency: Comfortable operating within Incident/Problem/Change frameworks; adept at runbooks, RCAs, and post-incident reviews.
  • Data mindset: SQL or log query languages; can translate telemetry into insights and narratives.
  • Soft skills: Clear communicator, collaborative partner, bias to action, and calm during outages.
     

Nice to Have

• • Service maps/dependency modeling, synthetic/RUM design, APM transaction tuning, log schema governance.
  • Experience integrating observability with CMDB/service catalog and feature flag systems.
  • Certifications (e.g., AWS, Datadog).
     

Working Model

• • Hybrid role in India collaborating with global teams; core hours aligned to IST with occasional off-hours participation for major incidents or change windows.
  • Part of an on-call rotation with follow-the-sun support.

Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Maharashtra. Please refer to the location posted on the requisition for where this role is based.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Pune.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here. 

Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Karnataka or Maharashtra. Please refer to the location posted on the requisition for where this role is based.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

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.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.