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Love your new job. Current openings at Zendesk.

Zendesk offers a web application for customer care and support. The application is used by more than a thousand businesses and millions of users all over the world. Our customers love our product and so do we. We're currently a team of ~25 people spanning the world. We're headquartered in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and are looking for unique profiles to compliment our team.

Product Designer

We are currently looking for an passionate, talented and experienced Product Designer. You'll be working with a world class team on a product that is renowned for putting usability first and you'll be reporting to the Chief Product Officer.

Your number one priority is to keep the Zendesk user experience pleasant and hassle-free. This includes initiating, suggesting and spearheading major UI refactorings for a cleaner and more intuitive user experience. You'll also be designing the UI/UX side of all new features and enhancements, with a strong focus on simplicity and manageability.

You have some prior work which you're very proud to show us and a deep understanding of web application usability, combined with a strong graphic flair and an eye for visual consistency. You enjoy designing elegant solutions to complex workflows, and you know the devil is in the details. You love to innovate and design things that people will tweet and blog about.

Requirements:

  • Well-versed in fundamental visual and interactive design discipline.
  • 5+ years of experience in a user-centered design environment at the intersection of product and engineering, preferably in the SaaS space.
  • Ability to articulate concepts and ideas through low- and high-fidelity prototypes, resulting in clear specifications for the development team.
  • A way with words and a knack for reducing the complex to the bare essentials.
  • Experience with user testing
  • A technical mindset and well-versed with HTML/CSS/JS/AJAX. Prototyping abilities using any of these is a big fat plus.

Application Engineer

We're looking for a developer extraordinaire. The ideal candidate is a pragmatist who enjoys turning complexity into well structured, scalable and maintainable solutions. You understand the importance of keeping things clean, and know what works and what doesn't.

You are confident with *nix and open source databases, and have extensive experience with at least a few of the following technologies (or strong desire to work with them): Memcached, Git/Github, Sphinx, Nanite/RabbitMQ, TMail, authentication mechanisms (OAuth, OpenID etc.), Amazon EC2/S3.

It's a strong bonus if you can provide code samples of your work, preferably from existing open source projects.

Responsibilities:

  • Design, implement, and maintain application and infrastructure components
  • Refactor and improve maintainability of the codebase
  • Rapidly fix bugs and solve problems
  • Conduct design and code reviews
  • Interface with product, front-end, and operations teams

Requirements:

  • Expert knowledge developing and debugging in Ruby on Rails
  • Disciplined approach to development, testing, and quality assurance
  • Strong communication and documentation skills
  • Preferably active contributor to open source software
  • Experience with git and version control
  • Experience with databases and caching

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We offer competitive compensation, vacation, medical and dental coverage, life and disability insurance, stock options and 401k.

Please send a brief to-the-point application with your resume to jobs@zendesk.com. Remote workers will not be considered.

To all recruitment agencies: Zendesk does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to Zendesk employees or any other company location. Zendesk is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Join Us in San Francisco for Our HQ Office Warming Party

As you likely already know we've recently relocated to San Francisco, home of our new global headquarters. On Thursday, October 29 from 5-8:30pm, we're hosting an office warming party in our new offices and we'd love to have you visit the new space and join us for a drink.

Our new offices are in SoMa on 410 Townsend just across the street from the CalTrain, and we're sharing the neighborhood with many of our friends and customers. In fact, our office building is also home to EventBrite, Yammer and Twine to name some.

We're thrilled to be keeping such good company and look forward to meeting many more from the community over the coming months and years.

RSVP for the event on the Zendesk Lovers Facebook page or on Eventbrite

Looking forward to seeing you!

Zendesk office warming san francisco

Zendesk Named One of Mighty 36 by SIME Awards

The jurors at the SIME Awards have named Zendesk as one of the Mighty 36 leading up to the November 12, SIME Awards.

The SIME Awards were created in 1996 to honor excellence in online communication, business practice and technology, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and inspire the Scandinavian Internet industry to world-class performance.

The SIME Awards team screened hundreds of companies in the Nordic countries (Zendesk's founders are from Denmark) to find the rising stars of the Nordic world. From a group of 150 potential companies, the SIME jury selects 36 companies that are featured in three groups of 12 in the six weeks leading up to the winner announcement at the Nov. 12, 2009 in awards ceremony in Stockholm.

Nikolaj Nyholm, SIME juror, said that Zendesk, "While simple in concept, is extremely well-executed with strong management. Zendesk is surely going to be an on-demand support software brand name."

The Mighty 36 puts us in excellent company and we wish everyone good luck!

Zendesk sime awards 2009

Migrating from Clarify, SSO in Rails, Expert CSS Tips

Want to learn how to do really great CSS customization with Zendesk, how you migrate tickets from your Clarify system to Zendesk, or are you looking for SSO with Zendesk from your Rails app? Here's three really great articles from the previous week on these exact subjects.

Migrating from Clarify
Gary Shermann, VP of Services and Support for Dovetail Software, demonstrates the power of APIs in this article describing how to migrate tickets from Clarify to Zendesk. Clarify was one of the leading old-school help desk products, now buried somewhere deep in the Amdocs product stack. Even if you're not migrating from Clarify, this article is a good inspiration for using the APIs to populate your Zendesk.

SSO under Ruby on Rails
Zendesk's remote authentication feature is a slick, easy and powerful way of implementing SSO for Zendesk. It makes Zendesk a serf of your primary authentication mechanism, that be MS Active Directory or any homegrown system. If your primary authentication system is built in Rails, Tobias Crawley from Hand Built Software LLC, has just released this little gem for helping you enable Zendesk SSO from your Rails application.

CSS Expert tips
We've recently mentioned Onehub and their really slick Zendesk implementation, taking the CCS customization capabilities to its boundaries. Now you can get a few tips directly from the source in this article published recently on Onehub's blog. BTW Onehub empowers virtual teams with online tools for collaboration. Remember to check them out.

Thanks everybody for sharing your knowhow and experiences with Zendesk.

A Tweet is Worth a Thousand Words

Nobody likes to brag, but the feedback we're getting after the launch of the new editions and new site last month, is outright humbling. Here's a few tweets from the last couple of days that we think capture our zen-ambitions excellently. Thanks guys. Love you.

Amazed by the slickness and volume of features behind Zendesk

With Zendesk I'm looking forward to switching backend

Zendesk SSO integration is easy

Zendesk a required case study

Thank You, Mr. Smith

Zendesk_is_an_amazing_tool

Come Join a Successful and Fast-growing Company in its Finest Hour

Zendesk offers a web application for customer care and support. The application is used by more than a thousand businesses and millions of users all over the world. We're currently a team of ~20 people spanning the world. We're setting up new headquarters in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and are looking for unique profiles to compliment our team:

- Online Marketing Manager - Filled
- Product Marketing Manager
- Product Manager
- Database Administrator - Filled
- UI/UX Designer
- Front-end Developer
- API Developer - Filled
- Back Office Developer - On Hold
- Application Engineer

Full job descriptions below the fold.

We offer competitive compensation, vacation, medical and dental coverage, life and disability insurance, stock options and 401k.

Please send a brief to-the-point application with your resume to jobs@zendesk.com. We will not respond to unsolicited recruiters. Remote workers will not be considered.

Read on

Reporting from the Cloud: On-demand Analytics with Youcalc

Last week we announced a new edition of Zendesk that included some new reporting features. With Zendesk Plus+, users now get a near real-time CSV feed of ticket data including resolution time metrics and custom fields. You can import the feed directly into Excel or another spreadsheet application. But what we think is really cool is the work that some of our partners are doing to make real-time reporting even more useful for our users. Today we're excited to highlight an app that allows you to connect directly into another cloud-based service.

Youcalc, an on-demand analytics company, has put together a really cool application -- the Dashboard for Zendesk -- that displays your tickets like you have never seen them before. The Youcalc dashboard can run standalone or be embedded into your website.

Zendesk and Youcalc cloud reporting

The Dashboard gives you the option to see your tickets at-a-glance which includes a ticket overview with any backlogged items and how tickets have been created over the last 10 weeks including a neat weekday overview as well as a time-of-day overview. And the ability to analyze tickets based on properties and an Agent Performance interface showing the distribution of tickets per agent as well as average resolution time.

Youcalc gives you the ability to copy and modify the standard reports using the Youcalc builder. And according to Youcalc's blog you can "expect more Zendesk apps to come as we get feedback from users and as users start to customize and build their own Zendesk analytics apps on Youcalc". Sounds very good.

Best of all, it's completely free. Grab it here.

As the new reporting feed is only available for our Plus+ customers, Youcalc has developed a widget for agents on all plans that makes it easier for them to track their personal performance. It's optimized for the Zendesk widget interface and can be implemented as a custom widget using Youcalc's code snippet. It also runs on the iPhone Safari browser making it easier to track reporting on-the-go. Get it from Youcalc's web site.

You can read more about both of these apps on the Youcalc blog. Enjoy!

Whoa!

It's hardly two weeks since I wrote about some really cool Zendesk implementations where customers had explored the capabilities of our CSS customization. And then this happens. Viewbook, the online service for visual creatives, and Onehub, the online collaboration solution, both launch these kick-ass Zendesk implementations that completely adopts the look-and-feel of their parent web sites that are awesome! Thanks for making us look so cool.

onehub and zendesk css coolness

viewbook and zendesk css coolness

New Products Announced as Peter Fenton joins Board (PR)

Today is a great day at Zendesk and we have 6 million new reasons to be excited!

First, we're psyched to announce two new Zendesk editions today. A Solo edition for independent consultants and home-based businesses, and a Plus+ edition for the somewhat larger companies with stricter governance requirements. The new editions constitute a big strategic step for us. Zendesk has been implemented in large organizations with thousands of employees and up to a hundred support reps, and in tiny boutiques with one agent and 25 customers. We knew we had to differentiate our offerings to be able to cater to all these different needs, but at the same time it was also critical that we kept the simplicity of the application and the transparency of the different editions. We think we have achieved that with our new offering, and we look forward to receiving your feedback. You can get all the details on the two editions of Zendesk at our brand new and snazzy web site.

P1060479

We’re also very excited to announce we’ve secured $6 million in series B funding and that Peter Fenton from Benchmark has joined our board. We closed this Series B much earlier than required, but the stars aligned and we felt that Benchmark was the exact right partner at the exact right point in time. The team at Benchmark has done incredible things in the SaaS and consumer technology markets and we look forward to tapping that energy to take Zendesk to a new level, fueling the momentum we've experienced in the last year. Pictured to the right you can see Peter, yours truly and Devdutt from Charles River Ventures. Devdutt's done a fantastic job with us the last six months, and we're really thankful for Charles River's continued support as they're joining the B round pro rata.

We have a lot of stuff up our sleeves. We have a very active customer community and we simply love all the feedback and feature requests that we get. We won't be able to get it all done at once, but most of the stuff that you're requesting will come as soon as we've found a "beautifully simple" way of implementing it. Stay tuned for more.

You can read the full press release on the new products and the Series B below the fold, but allow us to take this opportunity to thank some of the people around us that have made it possible so far: The early friends & family investors who put their personal money into this project, Christoph Janz, possibly the best angel investor a start-up can have, our first employees that have worked so hard for so little, the reporters that have followed us from early days, and last but not least, all of our utterly incredible customers. Thank you Crystal, David, Jake, Mike, Graham, Björn and the rest of you. Thanks for inspiring us to do our best.

Read on