At Zendesk, we create services enabling our over 50 thousand customers to interact with millions of their end-users every day. Our focus is on intuitively-designed, fast, and enjoyable experiences. We also spend a lot of time ensuring that our engineers get the same enjoyment out of our internal tools and platform.

Over the past three years, growing a distributed team across five international locations and expanding compute resources over 10 times in a few years has meant continuously battling problems of cultural and technical scale. Every team needs the ability to rapidly deploy new versions and services, while maintaining stability for operations and developers across our engineering organization.

In this session, we’ll talk about some of the unique challenges we’ve faced and solutions we’ve come up with to handle becoming a large distributed team, in a publicly traded company – while continuing the core traditions of engineering culture.