Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead
Zendesk
Mar 2023 – Mar 2026
Denver Metropolitan Area
Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead
Zendesk
Mar 2023 – Mar 2026
Denver Metropolitan Area
Designed and shipped agentic AI orchestration on the engineering organization, while continuing to lead the team responsible for Zendesk's email ingestion and ticket creation infrastructure, processing roughly 15M inbound and 45-55M outbound emails per day.
- Built agentic JIRA story-implementation workflows with custom team-persona guardrails; cut story-review time 60-70%, measured from live JIRA sprint data. Adopted by four engineering teams.
- Built a cross-tool agentic delivery system spanning implementation, testing, and rollout monitoring, wired to Datadog and PagerDuty; its rollout monitoring became shared support-org tooling.
- Delivered a top-40 Support-wide project in 10 business days against a 4-month estimate: two engineers on parallel agentic workstreams.
- Early adopter, with a partner team, of gen-AI models and coding agents; led their adoption into our teams' SDLC, built most of the workflows, shared skills, and guardrails, and contributed to org-wide skills.
- Technical lead for email ingestion, classification, routing, and ticket creation processing roughly 15M inbound and 45-55M outbound emails per day, including inbound-email-to-identity resolution and forwarding authentication and verification.
- Partnered with product in direct customer calls on discovery and escalations, including the out-of-office auto-reply decision, where ingesting automated replies would have added roughly 30% inbound volume: a capacity and customer-trust tradeoff, not a filtering one.
- Regularly pulled into large customer escalations: designed and shipped solutions on tight timelines while communicating directly with all levels of leadership and legal.
- Owned architectural direction, delivery strategy, and reliability posture for customer-interaction infrastructure.
- Led design reviews, execution planning, and incident response across multiple teams, including upstream and downstream incidents that landed on us.
- Drove the platform to near-zero self-inflicted incidents (at most one per quarter traced to our own changes), down roughly 50% year over year, through observability investment and Datadog-integrated rollout monitoring.
- Mentored senior engineers and emerging tech leads on decomposition, tradeoff analysis, and execution discipline.
- Contributed across the full stack: backend services, APIs, and frontend integration points.
- Ruby
- Rails
- TypeScript
- React
- Datadog
- PagerDuty
- MCP
- LLM orchestration
- AWS Bedrock
- SageMaker
- Internal ChatGPT
- Claude Code
- Codex
- GitHub Copilot
- Cursor
- Google Antigravity