Senior Information Technology Specialist - Change Manager

Job Description

Love bringing order to change without slowing down delivery? Zendesk is looking for a Change Manager who thrives on facilitating risk-based decisions—someone who chairs the Change Advisory Board (CAB), ensures due diligence, and helps teams deploy safely across our CIO-owned systems. This role is critical to our ITSM governance, coordinating the review, approval, scheduling, and risk assessment of technology changes.

The Role

The Change Manager will own the Change Management process for Zendesk’s internal IT services. You will chair the Change Advisory Board (CAB), facilitate the review and approval of Normal, Emergency, and New Implementation changes, maintain the IT Change Calendar, and enforce change freeze schedules. You will work across in-scope systems including Salesforce, NetSuite, RevPro, Workday Integrations, Google Workspace, Workato, and infrastructure—ensuring changes are appropriately defined, tested, and approved per SOX and policy requirements.

This is a process-focused role that combines facilitation, risk assessment, and stakeholder coordination. You will partner with platform owners, Security, Compliance, and Problem Management to evolve from traditional CAB toward error-budget-based change management over time.

What You’ll Do

• Chair the Change Advisory Board (CAB)—facilitate weekly CAB reviews; coordinate with requesters and voters on documentation, risk, and approval.

• Facilitate the review, approval, scheduling, and risk assessment of technology (CIO) changes across in-scope systems.

• Maintain the IT Change Calendar; enforce change freeze schedules (month-end, quarter-end) and document exceptions.

• Triage incoming change requests—ensure completeness (scope, risk assessment, rollback strategy, UAT results) before CAB review.

• Coordinate with Change Requesters, CAB Voters, and platform owners (Salesforce, NetSuite, Workato, etc.) on due diligence and upstream/downstream impacts.

• Support Emergency change path for incident-related changes; ensure post-implementation review where required.

• Partner with Problem Management and Reliability Engineering to validate that fixes are tested and successfully deployed.

• Evolve change governance—contribute to transition from manual CAB to error-budget-based standard changes (hybrid SRE model).

• Align Run change workflows to Securitydesk change policy; ensure system-of-record compliance (Jira, Zendesk, or designated tool).

• Champion process maturity by aligning Change Management to ITIL principles and supporting automation opportunities.
  

What You Bring

• Required: 5+ years of experience in Change Management, Release Management, ITSM, or IT Operations roles.

• Preferred: Experience in a global, high-growth tech company with SOX or compliance requirements.

• Strong working knowledge of ITIL Change Management and practical experience chairing or participating in CAB.

• Experience with change categorization (Normal, Emergency, Operational, Minor, New Implementation) and risk assessment.

• Familiarity with change freeze schedules, rollback strategies, and UAT validation.

• Understanding of in-scope systems (Salesforce, NetSuite, Workato, infrastructure) and integration dependencies.

• Excellent facilitation, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

• Ability to balance governance with delivery velocity—paved roads over bureaucracy.

• Exposure to SRE, error budgets, or DevOps change practices is a plus.
  

Nice to Have

• ITIL 4 Foundation or Change Management certification

• Experience with change management tools (Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk, SweetHawk, Myndbend)

• Knowledge of Agile/DevOps release practices and CI/CD pipelines

• Previous experience at a SaaS company or in a regulated environment
  

How We’ll Measure Success

• Timely and effective CAB facilitation; change requests reviewed within SLA.

• Reduction in unauthorized or failed changes; improved change success rate.

• Adoption and compliance with Change Management process and freeze schedules.

• Demonstrated partnership with platform owners, Security, and Problem Management.

• Contribution to evolution toward error-budget-based change for standard/low-risk changes.

Please note that Zendesk can only hire candidates who are physically located and plan to work from Karnataka or Maharashtra. Please refer to the location posted on the requisition for where this role is based.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.