Staff Engineer, Zapier
Site Reliability
$206-309.8k
+ Equity and bonu
Workflow automation service
Open for applications
Workflow automation service
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$206-309.8k
+ Equity and bonu
1001+ employees
Company mission
Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer with deep observability expertise and a proven track record of leading company-wide change
- You’re a seasoned engineer
- You have 10+ years of experience in systems engineering and software development, including Staff+ level roles where you’ve led broadly scoped, high-impact initiatives
- You’re a builder first
- You lead through hands-on contribution and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves to make things happen
- You thrive on jumping in alongside product teams to solve problems directly, unblock adoption of platform practices, and demonstrate what “good” looks like by building it
- You’re energized by executing—not just advising
- Observability is your craft
- You have deep, hands-on experience designing and operationalizing observability systems across metrics, logs, traces, and profiling
- You understand what it takes to turn telemetry into actionable insight—and build a culture that values it
- You lead systemic change
- You've defined and driven adoption of practices like SLOs, golden paths, and instrumentation standards across multiple teams or organizations
- You’ve helped teams evolve from reactive to proactive reliability
- 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
- You’re a strategic thinker
- You can define a long-term vision and identify incremental paths to achieve it
- You balance business goals, technical constraints, and developer experience
- You are customer- and team-oriented
- You have empathy for both internal engineers and the end users they serve
- You’re able to translate needs across organizational layers, balancing tactical team needs with strategic business impact
- You collaborate effectively with ICs, EMs, and executives alike, and you build trust by listening first and aligning on outcomes
- You’re a strong communicator
- You’re great at tailoring communication to different audiences—whether writing RFCs, mentoring engineers, or aligning leaders on tradeoffs and priorities
- 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
- You’ll join our Reliability Platform team, where we own incident response, service ownership, and observability, and you’ll play a pivotal role in strengthening Zapier’s posture across all three
- This isn’t just an infrastructure or tooling role
- We're looking for someone to set and drive a multi-year reliability strategy that enables Zapier engineers to deliver reliable products at scale
- You'll need to influence organizational culture and practice—shaping how engineers instrument, monitor, debug, and learn from their systems
- You’ll be a technical leader across teams and a mentor to engineers tackling complex systems problems
- You won’t just build observability tools—you’ll define what “good” looks like, partner with service teams to get there, and help elevate reliability practices across the organization
- Lead Zapier’s observability strategy
- Define standards and best practices for instrumentation, telemetry, alerting, and visibility
- Build prototypes, drive adoption, and work directly with engineers to embed observability into their workflows
- Accelerate platform adoption
- Actively partner with product and platform teams to remove friction in adopting golden paths for observability, service ownership, and incident response
- Where adoption lags, jump in and help build the missing pieces
- Elevate our incident lifecycle
- Help teams prevent, detect, and respond to incidents more effectively, and strengthen how we analyze and learn from them
- Mentor and guide engineers
- Share your expertise across the SRE and broader engineering org
- Uplevel teams’ understanding of reliability principles, observability tooling, and service ownership practices
- Influence service maturity
- Contribute to shaping what “owning a service” means at Zapier—including improving how engineers measure and understand reliability
- Drive platform-wide projects
- Collaborate across infrastructure, product, and data teams on initiatives like distributed tracing, centralized logging, or unified health dashboards
- Act as a reliability steward
- Partner with other Staff Engineers and Engineering Leaders to evolve Zapier’s engineering practices and reliability posture at scale
- Champion AI integration
- Use AI tools to optimize development, debugging, analysis, and documentation workflows—and support others in doing the same
- Our Stack & Tools
- Cloud & Infra: AWS, Kubernetes, Redis, Kafka, Terraform
- Observability: Grafana, Datadog, Opensearch, Prometheus, Sentry
- Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript
- CI/CD & Source Control: GitLab, ArgoCD
- What Success Looks Like:
- Observability is seen not as a platform function, but as an engineering-wide discipline
- Zapier teams can confidently answer: “Is my service healthy?”
- SLOs are not only defined, but actively used to guide engineering decisions
- Incidents are detected faster, recur less, and are learned from more effectively
- Teams feel empowered and supported in owning the reliability of their systems
- AI tooling is embedded across reliability workflows, increasing speed, quality, and experience
Application process
- We ask 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
- 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.
- Deadline to Apply: 19 September 2025 at 05:00 BST
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.
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