How Zendesk uses GitHub

Zendesk, a leading customer service and engagement platform, has relied on GitHub Enterprise Cloud as the foundation of its engineering operations for over nine years. With more than 800 engineers distributed globally and 3,000 employees total, Zendesk uses GitHub to coordinate development, maintain code quality, and scale securely across the organization.

Company Overview

Zendesk was founded in 2007 in Copenhagen and is now headquartered in San Francisco. The company serves over 145,000 paid customer accounts, helping billions of customers across phone, chat, email, social media, and other support channels. Zendesk has been a GitHub customer since 2010.

Engineering Workflow and Collaboration

As VP of Engineering, Jason Smale oversees infrastructure, productivity, and product teams that build and maintain Zendesk's suite of tools. With more than 50 percent of the engineering team working outside San Francisco, GitHub Enterprise serves as a critical communication tool for coordinating work across distributed teams.

The team practices "leading with code"—opening draft pull requests to move discussions forward rather than relying on theoretical conversations. This approach streamlines work and allows developers to schedule meetings with clear intent. Pull requests are central to the team's daily workflow, and recent GitHub innovations around merge strategies, review assignment, and semantic linking have made them even more integral to operations.

Zendesk values transparency and asynchronous collaboration. The engineering culture centers on teams owning services and being responsible for running them in production, with an innersource approach that allows anyone to contribute code across teams. This mirrors the open source community's maintainer model.

Open Source Contributions

Since its founding, Zendesk has contributed to the open source community. Notable projects include Ruby-Kafka, which has been forked more than 230 times and has over 800 stars, and Samson, a deployment tool used by Zendesk and many other businesses. Every commit pushed to GitHub triggers webhooks to integrations that assist engineers, and once merged into the master branch, the deployment pipeline kicks off.

The team also writes bots to manage engineering at scale, develops code coverage tools, and integrates security scanning tools. The GitHub API supports these integrations across repositories, allowing internal tools to analyze work and create daily reports that guide focus.

Product Innovation with GitHub

Zendesk has orchestrated two key product innovations using GitHub's capabilities:

Guide Themes allows Zendesk customers to brand their help centers using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By integrating Guide themes with GitHub, customers can build, preview, and update custom themes alongside the rest of their code, using a tool they already know.

App Framework enables users to customize their desktop experience within Zendesk's advanced platform. Zendesk provides a public GitHub repository with demo apps that customers can download, modify, and use to build on the Zendesk platform within minutes. This repository is consistently one of Zendesk's top downloaded resources. Today, Zendesk's Marketplace includes 600 public apps and a large number of privately-built apps. Customers fork repositories into private repositories rather than uploading zip files, streamlining the workflow and leveraging a familiar platform.

Security and Scale

Over the last five years, Zendesk has acquired five companies. GitHub Enterprise Cloud has been critical to securely expanding the team while maintaining security through two-factor authentication, Okta integration, and a single identity provider.

Zendesk depends on GitHub's reliability to support 800 engineers and complex deployment systems. "We need a highly available service to ensure reliability remains our most important feature," said Smale. GitHub Support has also been instrumental in helping Zendesk meet its goals as the company scales.

Recruiting and Onboarding

GitHub is the gold standard for engineers evaluating job opportunities. Smale encourages engineers to maintain a single GitHub profile throughout their career, as it provides historical context and practical insight into their work—valuable for both recruiting and career development. Once hired, engineers already know GitHub, which substantially accelerates internal ramp-up time.

Long-Term Partnership

"There's never been a moment where we considered moving off GitHub," said Smale. "That's radical for a piece of software we've used for over nine years." The continuous evolution of GitHub as a SaaS platform—with incremental improvements that compound over time—has kept it integral to Zendesk's operations and growth.