Summary
Phil Balchin is a Staff Engineer with 11 years of experience building and operating customer-facing tools and cloud platforms, currently leading engineering efforts at Zendesk. He brings deep Ruby on Rails expertise alongside front-end skills and a history of improving support experiences at Heroku by shipping integrated portals, CLIs, and automation that reduced friction for agents and customers. A former senior developer at Kyan, he combines client-facing product sensibility with platform-level debugging and incident work, and has acted as a Team Security Champion—bridging reliability, usability, and security. Based in Guildford, UK, his background in graphic design and photography informs a pragmatic, design-aware approach to UX and documentation. He’s comfortable moving between code, support workflows, and metrics-driven improvements, often eliminating repetitive tasks through small but high-impact engineering changes. Colleagues know him as a practical visionary who applies creative instincts to production-scale systems.
11 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Glebelands School
Graphic Design, Graphic Design at Guildford College