Staff Engineer, Zapier
Applied AI
$274.8-412.2k
+ Equity + Bonus. The base salary range is $274.8K–$412.2K in Canada, £157.2K–£235.8K in the UK, and €162.6K–€244K in Ireland and Spain
More information about location
Workflow automation service
Job no longer available
Workflow automation service
501-1000 employees
Job no longer available
$274.8-412.2k
+ Equity + Bonus. The base salary range is $274.8K–$412.2K in Canada, £157.2K–£235.8K in the UK, and €162.6K–€244K in Ireland and Spain
More information about location
501-1000 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 roles 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 AI Capabilities team, the group responsible for building the shared AI execution platform that powers every AI product at Zapier, including Agents, Chatbots, AI by Zapier, and future orchestration experiences
- This is one of the most foundational engineering roles at Zapier today
- AI Capabilities is unifying the runtimes, tooling, data models, and orchestration layers behind our AI products into a single, reliable, high-quality platform with great ergonomics
- We’re building what Zapier’s AI foundation should have been from day one—and we’re delivering it in a way that accelerates all other AI teams
- As the Staff Applied AI Engineer on this team, you’ll bring deep technical expertise in LLMs, orchestration, evaluation, runtime systems, and platform engineering
- You’ll help shape our unified architecture, guide tough tradeoffs, elevate our engineering standards, and ensure the platform is scalable, safe, cost-efficient, and easy to build on
- If you want to work on hard AI platform problems that directly impact user-facing products—and you’re energized by building the foundation that other AI-focused teams and millions of users will rely on—you’ll thrive here
- This is a rare opportunity to help build the AI platform behind one of the world’s largest automation ecosystems
- The AI Capabilities team empowers every runtime AI product at Zapier; Agents, Chatbots, AI by Zapier, and the orchestration surfaces yet to come
- You’ll work on challenges that matter: making AI reliable, fast, safe, cost-efficient, and easy to build on
- Your work will enable product teams to ship smarter features faster, and you’ll see your impact reflected directly in the experiences our customers use to run their businesses
- If you’re excited about high-leverage engineering work that blends platform design, system architecture, and applied AI, this role gives you a front-row seat to shape how intelligent automation gets built at scale
- Lead key architectural efforts in our unified AI platform: You’ll help define the orchestrator architecture, shared runtime components, and foundational APIs that bring Chatbots, Agents, AI by Zapier, and future experiences onto one high-quality platform
- Guide high-impact technical decisions across AI Capabilities: You’ll influence choices around orchestration patterns, execution flows, shared tools, memory, safety, and data model design
- Provide technical oversight as we consolidate runtimes: You’ll help navigate the merging of multiple systems into a single orchestrator; balancing reliability, speed, safety, and developer ergonomics
- Partner deeply with product teams across the AI org: You’ll work closely with Agents, Chatbots, AI Tasks, Copilot, and Chat surfaces to support migrations, define interfaces, and translate product needs into platform capabilities
- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for AI Capabilities: You’ll share patterns, teach practical AI engineering, and help grow the platform engineering culture on the teams you work with
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 operational needs. As people used more software services, Zapier founders saw the need to connect the actions between these software and save everyone some time.
Zapier is the largest integration and automation tool for businesses. Since its founding, 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 a pioneer of remote working.
Zapier has so far been able to capitalise heavily on its advantage as one of the 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 position for growth, 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
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding Zapier, wasEmail Marketing Manager with Veterans United Home Loans, and Customer Development Lead at The Idea Works.
Bryan Helmig
(Co-Founder & CTO)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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