Director of Engineering, Zapier
Infrastructure
$176.4-244.7k
Annual salary based in Spain and Ireland (may vary in further locations): €180.7K – €271K. All locations are eligible for equity and bonus
Senior and Expert level
Remote from Canada, Europe, UK, US
More information about location
Workflow automation service
Job no longer available
Workflow automation service
501-1000 employees
B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation
Job no longer available
$176.4-244.7k
Annual salary based in Spain and Ireland (may vary in further locations): €180.7K – €271K. All locations are eligible for equity and bonus
Senior and Expert level
Remote from Canada, Europe, UK, US
More information about location
501-1000 employees
B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation
Company mission
Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!
Role
Who you are
- You’ve built internal infrastructure platforms that engineering teams love to use
- You've led teams responsible for cloud, database, and event infrastructure
- You've built feedback loops with internal engineering customers that directly shaped your platform roadmap and investment priorities
- You understand that internal platforms are products, and you've treated them that way: measuring adoption, gathering feedback, and iterating towards customer delight based on developer needs
- You orchestrate AI systems and redesign how engineering work gets done
- You fundamentally rethink software development in an AI-first world
- You've used AI coding agents and orchestration tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar) hands-on and can demonstrate how you've applied them to transform your own work, your teams' output, and can quantify that impact
- You have a concrete vision for how AI will reshape infrastructure and developer tooling, and you've already started implementing it by rethinking roles, eliminating legacy workflows, and reallocating capacity based on where AI is headed
- You embed accountability and quality standards into AI-powered systems rather than lowering the bar for speed
- You iterate, refine, and critically evaluate AI outputs rather than accepting first-pass results and expect your team to do the same
- You are a builder, not just an operator
- You've built teams and systems from the ground up, not just inherited and optimized them
- You thrive in 0-to-1 environments where you're making hard trade-offs, retooling teams, and creating structure where little existed before
- You have a track record of leading through organizational change and ambiguity, and you actively seek out those challenges
- You are deeply customer-oriented
- You have a track record of deeply understanding your customers—internal developers, external partners, and cross-functional stakeholders
- You've built mechanisms to stay close to their needs and have used that insight to prioritize ruthlessly
- You're empathetic to the expectations of Zapier's customers and the needs of our developers
- You have scaled platform engineering and infrastructure organizations
- You are a skilled engineering leader who has built teams responsible for internal developer platforms and the infrastructure that underpins them
- You've shaped how product engineering teams build and ship software by investing in the foundational infrastructure and platforms
- You've managed teams of managers and technical leaders, helping each be successful
- You understand the infrastructure underpinning your platforms well enough to make sound architectural tradeoffs, but your focus is on developer outcomes, not infrastructure for its own sake
- You've driven developer velocity and quality through platform investment
- You've established data-driven approaches to measuring engineering velocity and quality both for your platform teams and for the product development teams they serve
- You understand the incompleteness and necessity of purely quantitative metrics and bring curiosity to maximize learning from them
- You've made the complex tradeoffs between velocity, cost, and functionality when building and supporting platforms
- You have vision and mechanisms to track and improve on Keep-The-Lights-On (KTLO) and reactive work in favour of increased investment in proactive and platform improvements
- You are a skilled mentor and coach
- You have a passion and track record of developing engineers and leaders
- You realize the best way to grow a team is by helping them grow themselves
- You're able to effectively share your experience and provide clear frameworks for growth
- You've developed the next generation of engineering leaders
- You are a skilled communicator
- You communicate proactively, write clearly, and know when async works and when to jump on a call
- You lean on all of these tools to communicate vision, strategy, plans, findings, and results to engineering and the broader Zapier team
- You champion efficiency and leverage
- You believe in systems and processes that let you scale impact beyond yourself and your immediate team
- You default to AI-first thinking when approaching new work and have built personal and team systems (copilots, workflows, or automations) that compound impact over time
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- As the Director of Engineering for Infrastructure, you’ll lead several multidisciplinary teams building, supporting, and evolving Zapier's core services, platforms, and infrastructure
- Your work directly enables every product team at Zapier to move faster and build better quality products
- This is a leadership role with scope to build
- Zapier is investing in platform engineering as a strategic priority, and you'll shape what that looks like: vision, scalability, accountability mechanisms, and how the organization operates
- Many of the processes and systems your teams need don't exist yet
- You will build them, partnering closely with our VP of Engineering and dedicated Platform PMs
- You'd be joining at a formative and transformational stage
- This is a build role where you'll be responsible for shaping the direction, not inheriting a finished state
- We're looking for someone energized by this kind of work: someone who sees a growing, evolving organization as an opportunity to make their mark and shape what comes next
- At Zapier, your work has a disproportionate impact on the business
- This organization spans cloud, database and event infrastructure and platforms
- A clear, shared vision for your organization that connects to internal developer needs and Zapier's overall strategy, with progress visible to leadership
- Define and drive the strategy and long-term roadmap for your organization in collaboration with your teams and Engineering/Product leadership peers
- Understand, measure, and articulate how your organization's work enables Zapier's product development velocity
- Understand, measure and articulate how reactive and Keep-The-Lights-On (KTLO) work will be reduced in order to increase investment in high leverage platform improvements
- Define and drive the AI transformation of your organization, re-architecting how platform engineering operates, how KTLO and reactive work is minimized, not just adding AI to existing workflows
- Identify and implement AI-powered tooling and automation that accelerates developer velocity and quality for the broader organization
- Set the pace for AI adoption across your teams; model the behaviors you expect from your engineers
- Build repeatable systems and workflows with AI, not just one-off uses; turn experiments into durable capabilities
- Unblock software delivery pain points specific to infrastructure through your organization's platforms, tooling, and partnership with product teams
- Establish data-driven approaches to measuring delivery velocity and quality; work with stakeholders, peers, and engineering teams to own those measures and deliver ongoing improvements
- Stakeholders and the broader org understand your organization's direction, tradeoffs, and results so they can plan and trust the platform
- In partnership with service-owning teams, be accountable for the uptime of Zapier’s core infrastructure and take action if that uptime falters
- Step in during major incidents at the director level by coordinating cross-functional resources and setting stakeholder expectations when severity demands senior leadership involvement
- Teams that ship consistently and retain talent because the work is compelling and the culture supports growth
- Managers and ICs have clear growth paths and the feedback they need to improve; you develop the next generation of leaders
- Growing and developing your teams by recruiting, hiring, retaining, and mentoring
- Own output and outcomes for your teams and the systems they own
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: July 1, 2026 at 5:00 AM GMT+1
- 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
- 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 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
Top investors
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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