david ashe
- → Senior Director of Engineering at Zendesk
- → Messaging · Voice · Contact Centre
$ cat ./about.md
Almost three decades in tech have taught me a great deal, but one thing that always stands out is that happy, empowered teams build the best software solving the right problems. Everything else, including architecture, process and, yes, even AI, works better when that foundation is solid.
That’s the mindset I bring to my role at Zendesk, where I lead a global engineering organisation of over 140 people building our Messaging, Voice and Contact Centre products, with hubs across EMEA, North America and Australia.
We’re in the middle of one of the most exciting shifts of my career, weaving AI into everything we do and transforming how businesses interact with their customers. This focus has contributed to Zendesk being recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
My focus is on partnering closely with Product, Design, and commercial leaders to map customer and market needs, designing an engineering organisation that scales without breaking, and ensuring our technical investments directly drive business value. Ultimately, it’s about aligning our overall technical direction with a fast-changing landscape so that the work we do shows up as something customers actually feel.
The people-side of my role is just as important to me: mentoring directors, managers and engineers across continents and helping them build the confidence to make the big calls. The result is high standards and genuine trust, which means you don’t just ship faster, you build teams that actually enjoy solving hard problems.
I came up the long way: started as a CAD draughtsman, taught myself web development, co-founded a small agency, then built the first native mobile team at Paddy Power Betfair (releasing some award-winning apps), and managed engineering teams at Intercom and CarTrawler before landing at Zendesk. That route, from hands-on builder to senior leader, shapes how I think about everything from hiring to architecture.
I’m always keen to connect with other leaders navigating the reality of scaling global teams or integrating AI into enterprise products, so feel free to reach out if you fancy a chat.
$ cat ./now.md
- Leading growth and change at Zendesk
- Ensuring our products remain industry-leading at a global scale requires far more than simply adding headcount. It is a continuous balancing act of evolving our architecture, aligning our engineering hubs across time zones, and driving change management. As we adapt to fast-paced enterprise demands, particularly the rapid shift towards
AI, my focus is on guiding both our people and technology through strategic pivots, ensuring our engineers have the clarity and support they need to stay empowered when the landscape shifts. - Integrating acquisitions
- Bringing a new company into the fold is one of the most complex challenges a leadership team can face. It’s never just a technical migration; it is a merging of cultures, philosophies, and working styles. I spend a lot of time focusing on how we successfully onboard acquisitions, ensuring that we integrate their technical stacks into our broader ecosystem, whilst, crucially, welcoming their talent into our culture without losing what made them successful in the first place.
- Leaning into
AIIntentionally - I spend a lot of my spare time experimenting with tools like Claude and Gemini. Rather than just reading the executive summaries, I want to understand exactly how these models change the day-to-day developer experience. Knowing their real-world capabilities and limits directly informs the strategic calls I make at work. This site, for example, was built, tested and deployed end-to-end with Claude and my current favourite plugin Superpowers.
- Building for Home Assistant
- I firmly believe leaders need to stay close to technology. To scratch the coding itch, I’m currently developing custom Home Assistant add-ons. It’s a brilliant playground for solving complex system problems with real-world applications, in my house anyway, not to mention occasionally breaking the heating.
$ ls ./building/
./home-assistant/
→ cd in for install + screenshots.