Staff Engineer, Zapier
Applied AI
$274.8-412.2k
Canadian annual salary: CA$274.8K – CA$412.2K. + Offers EQuity + Offers Bonus
More information about location
Workflow automation service
Be an early applicant
Workflow automation service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$274.8-412.2k
Canadian annual salary: CA$274.8K – CA$412.2K. + Offers EQuity + Offers Bonus
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!
Role
Who you are
- Proven engineering impact: You’ve driven outcomes in complex, cloud-based systems used by real customers
- Bonus: you’ve helped win or expand enterprise deals—leading POCs, navigating security/compliance reviews, or shaping product requirements to land enterprise adoption
- Many strong candidates for our Staff+ role have 10+ years’ experience
- We hire for impact and capability, not years
- LLM expertise: You have at least 2 years or equivalent depth of hands-on work with large language models in production, including user-facing products leveraging agent architectures
- You are familiar with transformer networks, attention mechanisms, and their role in generating responses, function calls, and other complex tasks
- Evaluation & retrieval systems: You have direct experience deploying evaluation frameworks for LLMs (performance, reliability, bias) and building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems
- You have nuanced perspectives and experience with indexing/chunking strategies, semantic search, and vector databases, and how they differ from traditional retrieval methods
- Builder first: You lead through hands-on contribution—pairing with product teams, unblocking adoption, modeling best practices, and shipping
- You execute, not just advise
- Pragmatic judgment over novelty: You separate signal from hype
- You’re comfortable saying “not ready for production” (and explaining why), and you partner with product to decide when to keep exploring vs
- When to lock down, standardize, and scale—using results from evals, user impact, and clear cost/latency tradeoffs
- You design for scale and ambiguity
- You can design systems and solutions in complex, high-scale environments—where priorities are fluid and ambiguity is the norm
- Skilled communicator: You’re known for moving fluidly between pair programming, cross functional problem-solving, and customer discovery
- You evaluate long vs
- Short-term solutions through the lens of speed to impact and cohesion of customer experience
- You form trusting relationships and know how to bring others with you
- You are an AI power user
- You proactively embrace AI as a core part of your engineering toolkit and are excited to explore new ways it can accelerate learning, development, and operations
- You don’t just use AI—you advocate for it, sharing your workflows and helping others level up
What the job involves
- Zapier is hiring a Staff Applied AI Engineer for our Agents team to make agentic automation actually useful at scale
- You’ll shape how our Agents plan, reason, remember, and safely take action through 8,000+ integrations—with enterprise-grade reliability
- This isn’t a labs playground
- Agents is customer-facing and revenue-impacting
- If you like shipping systems that thousands of teams rely on—not just demos—you’ll thrive here
- Make Zapier Agents the #1 way to get real work done with AI: A year from now, Agents is the obvious choice—and you’ve delivered features, spotted differentiation opportunities, advised on product strategy, and up-leveled how our teams and customers build with Agents
- Shape AI & Agents strategy: Stay close to the AI ecosystem, filter hype, and bring the right insights in-house for targeted experiments with crisp success criteria
- You’ll scout high-leverage opportunities, define how planning and tool integrations show up in the user experience, and set clear explore-vs-harden guardrails—including making the call when something isn’t production-ready
- Drive technical oversight: You’ll provide oversight for agent initiatives within and adjacent to Agents, ensuring we scale responsibly (security, privacy, reliability) while keeping velocity high
- You’ll help Zapier adapt to a growing surface area without losing coherence
- Advance agent architecture & developer experience: You’ll bring deep AI expertise to the Staff Engineer group, collaborate with Principal Engineers on company-level direction
- Build data-driven systems: You’ll design feedback loops and evaluation suites that capture real usage, synthesize core use cases, and improve grounding, tool-use success, prompting strategies, and model choice—balancing quality, latency, and cost
- Integrate and innovate (pragmatically): You’ll explore emerging agent capabilities and the ecosystem around them, then make crisp go/no-go calls and turn the right bets into durable product and platform wins
- Collaborate and teach: You’ll mentor engineers, codify practical agent patterns, and help teams and customers understand where Agents fits in their broader AI transformation—multiplying impact beyond your immediate team
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: October 31, 2025 at 4:00 AM GMT
Our take
Even before remote working became the "in thing", freelancers, small business owners, and large organisations have found themselves needing more and more software platforms to serve their operations needs. As people used more software services, Zapier founders saw the need to connect the actions between these softwares and save everyone some time.
Zapier is the largest integration and automation tool for businesses. Since being founded, Zapier has grown its suite of automation offerings across almost every mainstream software service. The company is one of the most successful to come out of Y Combinator, and has also been one of the pioneers of remote working.
Zapier has so far, been able to capitalise heavily on its advantage as first entrants and has had very little actual competition. Software services aren't going anywhere anytime soon and organisations are only going to need more of them. This puts Zapier in a strong place growth-wise but also opens up room for bolder companies to get in on the action. Companies like Airtable and Integromat are already preying on more niche segments of Zapier's market share.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
38% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Oct 2012
$1.3m
SEED
Sep 2012
$0.2m
SEED
Total funding: $1.5m
Company benefits
- Work from anywhere
- Bonus program
- Unlimited vacation policy
- Great healthcare + dental + vision coverage*
- Retirement plan with company match*
- Stock options for every Zapien**
- 2 annual company retreats to awesome places
- 14 weeks paid leave for new parents
- Home office setup stipend
- Professional development allowance
Additional info
- As a fully remote company with 800+ team members across 40+ states, 38 countries, and 18+ timezones, we’ve adopted a culture of asynchronous work. This work style allows teams to collaborate effectively across locations, time zones, skills, and each individual’s energy levels, and empowers employees to work in a setting that fits their needs. In practice, we live on Slack, with most conversations in public channels. It mimics the open-office feel and allows everyone to search the chat logs if they need to find something that happened when they weren’t around
Leadership
Wade Foster
(CEO & Co-Founder)Prior to co-founding Zapier, wasEmail Marketing Manager with Veterans United Home Loans, and Customer Development Lead at The Idea Works.
Bryan Helmig
(CTO & Co-Founder)Was previously Product Dev/Manager at Veterans United Home Loans.
Mike Knoop
(Co-Founder)Was CPO and Head of Labs at Zapier before becoming President. Previously was a Graduate Research at the University of Missouri.
Share this job
View 28 more jobs at Zapier