Sr. Backend Engineer

Job Posted: 09/27/2024

Location:  Americas time zones (Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific)

Hi there!

As Zapier continues to scale our mission to democratize automation, we’re hiring for multiple Senior Backend Engineer roles to join our cutting-edge Accounts teams. Our mission is to help users organize all of their automation assets in a single, intuitive place, enabling teams to effortlessly locate and understand the systems they've built on Zapier.

Imagine being at the forefront of transforming how millions of users manage their workflows. The Accounts teams are pioneering this charge by developing the next generation of features for organizing, monitoring, and scaling workflows within Zapier. By centralizing all critical tools into one cohesive hub, we empower users to maintain a complete and seamless understanding of their operations at any scale, and easily manage an entire use case from a single surface.

The impact of our projects is profound—by streamlining tools and resources, we save our customers valuable time and reduce friction as their workflows and use cases grow. In doing so, we ensure that Zapier not only stays effective but becomes even more powerful the more it's used. Join us to be a part of this transformative journey and help shape the future of automation management at Zapier.

Zapier is dedicated to making everyone more productive at work. We have empowered millions to build businesses through automation, and the Accounts team plays a crucial role by ensuring customers have seamless, powerful tools to manage their Zaps and other Zapier assets easily. By streamlining user experiences, we enable our customers to focus on what matters most to them—building and scaling their businesses with confidence.

If you’re interested in advancing your career at a fast-growing, profitable, impact-driven company, then read on…

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

About You

• You have 7+ years of experience. You've dedicated at least 5 of those years to building distributed,  scalable web applications. You have strong communication skills, problem-solving abilities and are driven to deliver outstanding customer experiences for both our external users and internal stakeholders.

• Required technical skills/experience:

  • Strong expertise in using Python for building web services.

  • Strong experience with AWS and cloud technologies.

  • Experience working with MySQL and/or Postgres and shipping database-backed web services at scale

  • Experience working with Kafka, SQS, or other event based technologies.

  • Using tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Datadog and for monitoring and performance optimization, and to identify and address performance bottlenecks.

  • Familiarity with Agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum, Kanban) and tools like Jira for sprint planning, backlog management, and collaboration with cross-functional teams.

• Nice-to-have technical skills/experience:

  • Proven experience in iterative customer feature delivery, driving product enhancements through continuous feedback cycles, with a focus on delivering high-impact features in short, incremental releases.

  • Extensive experience in developing scalable and reliable APIs that are successfully adopted by internal and/or external teams, with a focus on usability, performance, and clear documentation.

• You value collaboration. You understand that building modern software is a team sport, and you enjoy working as part of a tight-knit team. You’re happy to pitch in and help the team, whether by reviewing code, pairing on a tricky problem, or just thinking about how to solve the challenges we’re facing.

• You value exploration and versatility. You are comfortable working in other teams’ codebases to achieve the Edge team’s goals. This will involve embedding yourself in the other team, becoming familiar with their developer workflow, and collaborating with stakeholders on the other team to implement your solutions.

• You can balance lots of concerns. Our team manages a wide variety of services catering to a broad spectrum of internal clients. You'll be expected to adeptly balance incoming work to address these services, prioritizing them ruthlessly yet judiciously. Your ability to manage this diversity without being overwhelmed is crucial, ensuring not only that we meet our varied demands but also consistently deliver high-quality, impactful results in our dynamic, fast-paced environment.

• You advocate for the user. You have a keen eye for great design, and you’re empathetic to the needs of the end-user. When you see users struggling to succeed you take it as a personal challenge to understand why and help the team build a better product.

• You love learning new things. You love researching new tech and driving forward with the implementation details.

Things You'll Do

• Lead feature design and development: As a feature lead on some projects, you’ll develop work plans that enable our team to incrementally deliver value to our customers. You’ll provide leadership for junior engineers throughout the work, and help keep stakeholders informed of status and progress.

• Build APIs for internal teams: You’ll work with teams across the entire Zapier organization to provide interfaces to data the Manage team owns, such as Projects and sharing data.  

• Become an expert in our team’s services: We’ll look to you over time to provide expertise in our team’s backend services, and to recommend long term strategy for evolving them to meet business requirements.

• Collaborate with Staff Engineers: Provide design documentation for staff engineer review, and align team’s architecture with our broader engineering initiatives.

• Mentor and Help Grow Fellow Engineers: While our team is experienced, we want someone who will continue to drive the growth of the team and be a solid mentor to their fellow engineers.

• Monitor System Health: Regularly check system reliability and performance, ensuring high availability and optimal user experience.

• Resolve Bugs and Address Feature Requests: Dive deep into any reported issues, ensuring they're resolved promptly, and constantly look for areas of improvement based on user feedback.

• Collaborate Across Teams: Engage with various teams and stakeholders throughout Zapier, bringing value to our customers in innovative ways.

You’ll also have the opportunity to specialize in a variety of areas of the Zapier codebase. Focusing on a specialization will not limit your growth at Zapier as we believe that each engineer brings a unique perspective and can contribute in all areas. We encourage collaboration and will frequently have engineers contribute across teams to assist with projects.

How to Apply

At Zapier, we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us better, which is why we have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. We're looking for the best fit for each of our roles, regardless of the type of companies in your background, so we encourage you to apply even if your skills and experiences don’t exactly match the job description. All we ask is that you answer a few in-depth questions in our application that would typically be asked at the start of an interview process. This helps speed things up by letting us get to know you and your skillset a bit better right out of the gate. Please be sure to answer each question; the resume and CV fields are optional.

Education is not a requirement for our roles; however, if you receive an offer, you will need to include your most recent educational experience as part of our background check process.

After you apply, you are going to hear back from us—even if we don’t see an immediate fit with our team. In fact, throughout the process, we strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application. We know we’ll make mistakes from time to time, so if you ever have questions about where you stand or about the process, just ask your recruiter!

Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and we're excited to work with talented and empathetic people of all identities. Zapier does not discriminate based on someone's identity in any aspect of hiring or employment as required by law and in line with our commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be, and we celebrate our differences because those differences are what allow us to make a product that serves a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.

Zapier is committed to inclusion. As part of this commitment, Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact jobs@zapier.com. 

Application Deadline:

The anticipated application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later, or if the position is filled.

Even though we’re an all-remote company, we still need to be thoughtful about where we have Zapiens working. Check out this resource for a list of countries where we currently cannot have Zapiens permanently working.