Senior Manager, Technical Architecture

Location : Austin, Texas (Hybrid)  Department / Team: Professional Services - Technical Services Reports to : Senior Director, Technical Services Why This Role / Why Now As customers adopt more sophisticated AI-enabled experiences and integrations, strong technical architecture is critical to successful transformation. Within Zendesk’s Professional Services organization, Technical Architects help customers design, configure, integrate, and extend the Zendesk platform to solve complex business needs, accelerate time to value, and achieve measurable business outcomes. Mission Lead and grow a team of Technical Architects who help enterprise customers design, implement, integrate, and adopt scalable solutions on the Zendesk platform. Set standards for discovery, project scoping, solution design, AI-enabled delivery, and value realization—helping customers accelerate time to value, increase adoption, achieve measurable business outcomes, and build long-term platform success that contributes to renewal readiness and retention. What you’ll be doing Lead and develop the Americas Technical Architecture team: Hire, coach, develop, and retain a distributed team of Technical Architects while setting clear expectations for performance, growth, and technical leadership. Lead project scoping and advisory engagements: Partner with Sales, Professional Services, and customers to define scope, clarify assumptions, assess effort and complexity, identify risks and dependencies, recommend solution options, and align delivery with customer outcomes and business value. Own portfolio delivery health: Improve planning, forecasting, resourcing, risk management, scope, dependencies, and delivery predictability across concurrent customer engagements. Build cross-functional alignment: Influence senior stakeholders, resolve trade-offs, and drive consensus across internal teams and customer organizations. Partner with Product : Deepen Technical Architect expertise, provide roadmap feedback, participate in beta initiatives, identify capability gaps, and expand the team’s skills, influence, and career opportunities. Advance AI adoption and enablement: Champion practical, responsible AI adoption across the Technical Architecture team and wider organization by sharing use cases, building capability, developing reusable patterns, and scaling proven practices through cross-functional partnerships. Raise architecture standards and drive continuous improvement: Establish consistent approaches to discovery, solution scoping, design, documentation, governance, and quality while using customer and operational insights to improve delivery practices. What you bring to the role People leadership: You hire, coach, develop, and build high-performing technical teams. Technical architecture leadership: You guide complex, multi-system designs that balance scalability, simplicity, security, adoption, and implementation practicality. SaaS and customer outcomes: You connect architecture decisions to time to value, adoption, delivery predictability, customer satisfaction, and long-term platform success. Portfolio and delivery discipline : You manage scope, dependencies, risks, timelines, delivery health, and competing priorities. Executive and cross-functional influence: You communicate clearly, navigate conflict, and build alignment across technical, business, internal, and customer audiences. AI fluency and responsible judgment: You identify high-value AI applications, assess risks and trade-offs, and promote responsible use of AI and customer data. Continuous improvement: You anticipate needs, adapt to changing priorities, and turn customer and operational insights into better ways of working. Change leadership: You evolve team structures, roles, processes, and workflows to improve collaboration, efficiency, scalability, and business impact.

8+ years of professional experience in Technical Architecture, Solutions Architecture,