Senior Operations Manager, AI Agents & Knowledge

About the Role: Senior Operations Manager, AI Agents & Knowledge at Zendesk

Zendesk is seeking an experienced and strategic leader to work directly with the Vice President of our AI Agents, Knowledge and Analytics products, as well as their Product, Design and Engineering leadership team, to accelerate innovation.

As a Senior Operations Manager, you will lead efforts to ensure our Product Development team is collaborating efficiently and transparently with each other, as well as cross-functional counterparts, to remove friction and operational burdens. You will be responsible for defining and managing the operational cadences of the product development team to ensure alignment with business goals and efficient execution.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to define, implement, and run the operational cadence for the Product Development team, including product reviews, roadmap planning, and OKR processes.
• Design and implement scalable workflows and communication frameworks to enable seamless cross-functional collaboration across Product, Engineering, Design, and other stakeholders.
• Establish and manage robust processes for Product Development teams to interact with Go-to-Market (GTM), Customer Experience (CX), and other customer-facing teams.
• Design and implement operational processes to ensure that customer and stakeholder questions/feedback are handled in a timely manner.
• Develop and maintain hiring playbooks, scorecards, interview frameworks, and onboarding documentation tailored for AI product and engineering roles.
• Support release planning and standardization to align product development cycles with business priorities.
• Act as a trusted operational partner to the VP, managing day-to-day staff coordination without direct people management responsibilities.

Qualifications

This role requires expertise in SaaS Product Development and running operational cadences for a fast-paced technology organization. The ideal candidate has experience in B2B SaaS, AI, or enterprise software development and has led initiatives to increase product quality and velocity.

• Strong organizational, operational and coordination skills with ability to support senior leadership in managing teams operationally.
• Proven ability to drive process improvement, increase team productivity/engagement and deliver results in a high-complexity environment.
• Excellent communication skills and demonstrated ability to collaborate cross-functionally with Execs, Customer-facing & GTM stakeholders, recruiting, HR, product, and engineering partners.
• Data-driven with skills in tracking, analyzing, and reporting.
• Familiarity with AI products and scaling operations for AI focused products highly desirable.
• Experience in AI-driven SaaS or enterprise software highly desirable.

This individual contributor role offers a vital chance to define and execute the operational excellence and staff management support, enabling Zendesk’s AI product and engineering organizations to scale and innovate successfully.

Work Arrangement

This is a Hybrid role, offering a rich onsite experience for connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration, while also providing flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. Specific in-office schedules will be determined by the hiring manager.

Key skills/competency

• Operations Management
• Product Development
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Process Improvement
• SaaS Experience
• AI Products
• Workflow Design
• OKR Processes
• Stakeholder Management
• Strategic Planning