MLA Places Shanti Ariker as General Counsel at Zendesk

Hanover, MD (January 26, 2021) — Major, Lindsey & Africa (MLA), the world’s leading legal search firm, are pleased to announce the placement of Shanti Ariker as senior vice president and general counsel at Zendesk.  The search was conducted by Jay Kim, partner, and Lina Guo, director, both of MLA’s In-House Counsel Recruiting group in San Francisco.

As general counsel, Shanti will serve as a strategic thought-partner and advisor to the CEO and board of directors on all legal and compliance matters, providing effective leadership for the legal function, ensuring the integrity of the governance framework through compliance, with statutory and regulatory requirements as well as implementing decisions made by the board of directors. She will also manage an experienced legal team that currently consists of 20 plus professionals globally.

Zendesk is a service-first CRM company that builds software designed to improve customer relationships. Zendesk’s support, sales and customer engagement software is powerful and flexible, and scales to meet the needs of any business. Zendesk has over 4,000 employees globally, serving more than 160,000 customers across hundreds of industries in over 30 languages, and operates offices worldwide.

“It was a true pleasure to work with Zendesk on this much-sought after position,” said Jay Kim. “Shanti is uniquely qualified for the role of Zendesk’s new general counsel. Her global experience in the SaaS space paired with her solid leadership and mentoring, keen vision and tireless drive and energy will make her an asset immediately to the stellar legal team at such a respected company.”

Shanti most recently served as vice president, deputy general counsel, corporate and commercial and assistant corporate secretary for cloud communications platform Twilio Inc. where she managed a team of more than 40 lawyers and legal professions globally with responsibility for all corporate and commercial legal matters. Prior to joining Twilio, she spent a year with Autodesk as a senior director and senior corporate counsel. Before Autodesk, she was general counsel, chief of staff and corporate secretary for Salesforce.org. She began her legal career as an associate with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.

Shanti earned her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.