Senior Platform Architect (Presales)

Description

Position Overview

As a Senior Platform Architect , you will serve as the technical strategist helping our largest enterprise customers and prospects unlock the full potential of the AI-powered Zendesk Resolution Platform . You will design and architect next-generation service solutions that drive measurable business outcomes, transforming traditional support centers into highly efficient, Autonomous Service Workforces .

Simultaneously, you will act as a critical technical advisor to our enterprise sales organization, providing technical architecture guidance, driving proofs of concept, securing technical wins, and helping exceed new-bookings, expansion, and customer-retention targets.

Main Responsibilities

Strategic Value & Executive Advisory

Executive Technical Value: Partner with sales engineers, account executives, and business consultants to lead strategic discussions and communicate complex architectures, solution designs, and the business value of AI to C-suite and director-level executives.

ARR & Pipeline Impact: Serve as a high-impact technical overlay resource, driving ARR through automated resolutions by conducting strategic technical discovery, scoping, and successfully managing complex Proof of Concepts (POCs) for key expansion and cross-sell opportunities.

Positioning Zendesk’s Headless Capabilities: Demonstrate the value of Zendesk’s headless capabilities and help customers embed Zendesk into workflows across and beyond the core platform, including through MCP and, where applicable, A2A integrations.

AI & Platform Architecture

Autonomous Service Deployment: Design and deploy multi-step, agentic workflows using Zendesk Agent Builder and Action Builder, helping customers reach and exceed an 80% automated resolution target.

Ecosystem Integration & Connectivity: Architect modern integrations connecting the Zendesk platform to external AI platforms and enterprise applications. Design these connections using MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, comprehensive APIs, and advanced Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS), while applying scalable enterprise integration patterns.

Knowledge & Memory Engineering: Leverage Zendesk’s Context Graph, an operational memory layer, and Knowledge Graph connectors to integrate unstructured, federated enterprise data sources (e.g., SharePoint, Confluence, and Google Drive) into the customer’s AI ecosystem without data migration.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Delivery

The “Road to 80%” Methodology: Lead the critical technical handoff between presales and post-sales implementation teams, ensuring long-term AI deployment success, continuous quality assurance through AI Quality Scores, and ongoing expansion.

Subject Matter Expert (SME): Act as the organizational authority on Zendesk platform security, global scalability, custom data models, and Zendesk Copilot implementations.

Product Liaison: Partner directly with Product Engineering and Product Marketing to serve as a feedback loop, directly shaping the future roadmap of Zendesk’s AI architecture.

Required Qualifications

Core Experience & Business Acumen

Solutions Architecture & Consulting: 8+ years of experience in enterprise systems or solutions architecture, technical presales, or professional IT consulting services.

AI & Large Language Model (LLM) Literacy: Experience architecting and deploying generative AI solutions, prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks, and agentic AI reasoning systems.

Modern API & Integration Proficiency: Advanced expertise with RESTful APIs, JSON, web services, database design, data modeling, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) configurations.

Infrastructure & Security

Cloud Ecosystems & iPaaS: Deep familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and GCP) and experience designing and orchestrating enterprise data integrations using iPaaS solutions.

Enterprise Security & Compliance: Comprehensive knowledge of single sign-on (SSO), OAuth, data privacy frameworks, and token-based authentication for AI systems.

Technical Web Stack: Solid understanding of frontend technologies and scripting languages, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as modern SaaS application architectures.

Soft Skills & Leadership

Exceptional Communication: Proven track record of influencing senior stakeholders, translating highly technical AI concepts into business outcomes, and delivering high-quality technical presentations both on-site and remotely.

Thriving in Fast-Paced Environments: Ability to prioritize multiple complex, concurrent transformation accounts while maintaining a proactive, can-do attitude.

Desirable Qualifications

Enterprise Software Implementation: Previous experience managing large-scale implementations of enterprise-class customer service software or ITSM platforms.

Advanced Analytics & Business Intelligence: Experience utilizing advanced diagnostic analytics systems for root-cause and trend analysis.

Modern Frontend Technologies: Familiarity with modern JavaScript frameworks such as React or Vue, plus familiarity with Node.js, to assist in custom application development.

Practical experience using AI-augmented tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) to enhance daily productivity, scale technical output, and model AI best practices.

Strong sales acumen and prior experience in a technical pre-sales or solutions architecture role within an enterprise SaaS or CX environment. Experience with platforms such as Salesforce Service Cloud, ServiceNow, Intercom Fin, or Freshworks is highly desirable.

LI-UK1

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.