Senior Backend Engineer, Zapier
Manage
$167.4-251k
+ Equity and Bonus Canadian Salary: $167.4K – CA$251K + Equity and Bonus
AWS
Python
Kafka
Postgres
MySQL
Prometheus
Grafana
JIRA
Zapier
Datadog
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US
More information about location
Workflow automation service
Open for applications
Workflow automation service
1001+ employees
B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation
Open for applications
$167.4-251k
+ Equity and Bonus Canadian Salary: $167.4K – CA$251K + Equity and Bonus
AWS
Python
Kafka
Postgres
MySQL
Prometheus
Grafana
JIRA
Zapier
Datadog
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US
More information about location
1001+ employees
B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation
Company mission
Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
Desirable
- 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
What the job involves
- As Zapier continues to scale our mission to democratize automation, we’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join the cutting-edge Manage team
- 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
- 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
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: 31 October 2024 at 04:00 GMT
- 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!
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
Top investors
Company
Funding (1 round)
Oct 2012
$1.3m
SEED
Total funding: $1.3m
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
Company values
- Default to Action - At Zapier, we're building toward a future that does not yet exist. As a result, delivering something real today—and learning from it—is typically better than delivering something of questionably better quality next week. However: action is not an achievement unto itself. Instead, our actions should connect to clear priorities and outcomes, especially what's best for our mission and customers.
- Default to Transparency - We're a growing, distributed team across more than a dozen time zones. We do our best work when we make projects, processes, and systems available to everyone who needs them—inclusive of our customers. Transparency promotes equity and inclusion within our team and customer base. So work in public. Have discussions in the open and document your work. Transparency does not mean consultation or consensus on all decisions. In fact, an important form of transparency is clarity on who is responsible for a decision and who will be consulted.
- Grow Through Feedback - We set ambitious goals at Zapier. We want our customers, people, and company to grow. Achieving these goals requires us to regularly learn and improve. Thankfully, our success has more to do with how quickly we learn than how "perfect" we are in a given moment. Whether it's about how we work or the work itself, feedback enables growth. As such, feedback is one of Zapier's most essential practices. Even so, feedback can be hard to give and hard to receive. We make a point to become good at it anyway—it's just that important.
- Empathy Over Ego - Our customers and teams are part of a global community. To serve them best, we need to understand them. Empathy promotes understanding, curiosity, and humility—qualities that help us connect with and serve our customers. Empathy has similar positive effects on collaboration and belonging within our team. On ego: we all have them, and it's important that we share our perspectives in pursuit of what's right. But sometimes ego can bias our thinking too strongly toward our own views. It's for this reason that we emphasize empathy over ego.
- Build the Robot - No matter your role, you'll find yourself doing repetitive work. Zapier is all about finding ways to work better—whether through automation, simplification, or prioritization—so that we can spend more time doing what humans do best. Note that it's unhelpful to automate or simplify the wrong process or outcome. Manual, less efficient processes are often the right approach early on. We default to action and accept inefficiency when it helps confirm the problems we're solving, and to test solutions for those problems.
Articles
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.
People progressing
Joined as Customer Champion, promoted to Senior Customer Champion after 1 year, then again to Team Lead. He is now a Manager for the Paid Support Team.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Zapier
Maggie Roque (Director of DIBE )
- At Zapier, we believe in DIBE as DNA. This paradigm serves three purposes: It is an aspiration (what we want to see in the future), an action (a conscious effort to lean into our vision in our day-to-day work), and a principle (a guiding truth that we build better products and environments when we build for everyone). We've had candid conversations as a company about the experience of our teammates through the employee lifecycle—from the first impression we make as a company to our internal promotion process to our exit interview. We’ll continue to have those candid conversations and to invest in our efforts to improve
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