Director, Platform Architecture

Job Description

Director, Contact Center Platform Architecture

At Zendesk, we’re on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We’re looking for a technically credible leader to build and lead our global contact center, center of excellence solutions architecture team focused on customer experience, cloud contact centres, and AI.

This is a hands-on management role. You’ll grow a globally distributed team while shaping technical strategy and engaging directly with enterprise customers, senior executives, and the wider industry. You’ll help customers solve complex contact-centre challenges and bring teams across Zendesk and our partner ecosystem together to deliver practical, trusted solutions.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead and grow a global team: Manage, coach, and develop a distributed team of solutions architects. Set clear expectations, support career growth, build leadership capability, and plan hiring, workload, and regional coverage.
• Set technical direction: Guide architecture for solutions spanning AWS, Amazon Connect, Zendesk, enterprise systems, and AI services. Set practical standards for security, reliability, integration, and maintainability.
• Stay hands-on: Engage directly in important customer opportunities, complex technical decisions, prototypes, demonstrations, and proofs of concept. Help the team turn technical designs into credible, supportable solutions.
• Lead customer engagements: Guide technical discovery and solution design with customer executives, business leaders, and technical teams. Explain architecture, trade-offs, risks, and business value clearly.
• Represent the team externally: Present and represent the contact-centre team in executive meetings, customer engagements, industry events, and briefings with industry analysts.
• Collaborate across Zendesk: Work with Sales, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Services, Partner and Marketing to align customer needs, solution scope, product feedback, and implementation readiness.
• Build strong partner relationships: Develop technical and leadership relationships with AWS and other strategic partners, and coordinate joint priorities and customer engagements.
• Improve how the team operates: Prioritise work against customer and business needs, create reusable architectures and demonstrations, and share field insights and resource needs with senior leadership.

What you bring to the role

• A strong record of leading, coaching, and developing technical teams, ideally across multiple regions and time zones.
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS and Amazon Connect.
• Substantial contact-centre or CCaaS knowledge, including contact-centre operations, customer-service workflows, and cloud contact-centre architecture.
• Experience in enterprise solutions architecture, technical presales, or a comparable customer-facing technical leadership role.
• The technical judgment to guide complex integrations and architectures across cloud services, APIs, and enterprise platforms.
• Executive presence and the ability to build trust with C-level stakeholders, customers, partners, analysts, and technical teams.
• A practical, hands-on leadership style: able to set direction, develop others, and personally contribute to critical customer and technical work.
• Strong communication and commercial judgment, with the ability to make sound decisions across teams and through ambiguity.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in solutions architecture, technical presales, sales engineering, or enterprise technical consulting.
• 5+ years of experience managing and developing technical, customer-facing professionals.
• 5+ years of experience in contact-centre technologies, including Amazon Connect, CCaaS platforms, or contact-centre integrations.
• Demonstrated hands-on AWS and Amazon Connect experience.
• Experience designing enterprise contact-centre solutions and integrations across CRM, telephony, workforce management, APIs, and cloud services.
• Experience leading complex customer engagements and presenting technical recommendations to senior or C-level audiences.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading globally distributed teams across regions and time zones.
• AWS Solutions Architect certification, Amazon Connect certification, or relevant Amazon Connect training or badges.
• Experience migrating legacy contact-centre platforms to the cloud and designing voice and omnichannel workflows.
• Familiarity with integration technologies such as SIP, WebRTC, APIs, and event-driven architecture.
• Experience with contact-centre AI, automation, analytics, or workforce-management capabilities.
• Coding or scripting experience for prototypes and technical validation.
• Experience speaking at industry events, briefing analysts, or representing a technical organisation publicly.