Engineering Manager, Zapier
Runner
CA$187.8-281.7k
USD: $187.8K – $281.7K + Offers Equity + Offers Bonus
Workflow automation service
Open for applications
Workflow automation service
1001+ employees
Open for applications
CA$187.8-281.7k
USD: $187.8K – $281.7K + Offers Equity + Offers Bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!
Role
Who you are
- You have deep experience building and operating complex distributed systems at scale. You’ve worked in high-volume production environments and bring a strong reliability mindset. You treat outages as opportunities to improve and invest in system-wide visibility, graceful degradation, and operational excellence
- You’ve built and led platform teams. You understand how to build infrastructure consumed by other product teams, and you're skilled at managing internal customer relationships through effective feedback loops, rituals, and roadmap planning
- You lead senior engineers through strategy and mentorship. You’ve managed and grown high-performing engineers at the senior and staff levels, helping them scale their impact while driving alignment around a cohesive technical direction
- You’re customer- and data-driven. You understand the downstream impact of infrastructure changes on end users, and you define and monitor success metrics that reflect reliability and business value. You're confident adapting priorities month-to-month based on what the data tells you and clearly communicate tradeoffs to peers and executives
- You’re comfortable with our tech stack. You have hands-on experience with Python and have built systems using AWS services like SQS, S3, and Lambda, optimizing for both performance and cost
- You collaborate with clarity and empathy. You bring teams together, working across product, design, support, and infrastructure to solve problems. You communicate complex ideas in a simple way, and you're skilled at keeping stakeholders informed and aligned
- You think like a product owner. You know how to shape and prioritize a platform roadmap that supports long-term technical health while unlocking new capabilities for internal builders. You make room for foundational investments like tech debt paydown while delivering user-facing improvements
What the job involves
- We're looking for an Engineering Manager to join the team at Zapier
- We’re on a mission to make everyone more productive at work
- Zapier has helped millions of people build businesses through the power of automation
- Zapier's Runner team owns the Zap Execution platform — the engine that powers millions of automated workflows (Zaps) every single day
- As the Engineering Manager for Runner, you'll be leading a team at the heart of Zapier’s automation infrastructure
- Your team ensures that Zaps run reliably, efficiently, and at scale, while evolving the system to support new product capabilities and performance requirements
- This platform is mission-critical: any improvement or regression in the execution pipeline has a ripple effect across Zapier’s customer base
- Leading the Runner team means driving innovations that make the platform more resilient, scalable, and developer-friendly — while partnering closely with internal stakeholders who build on top of it
- If you're passionate about high-scale distributed systems, building platform capabilities for other engineers, and coaching senior engineers on tough, systems-level challenges, this role could be a great fit
- Lead the Runner team: support a group of experienced engineers in building and evolving Zapier’s Zap Execution platform
- Drive platform excellence: ensure the execution pipeline is robust, observable, performant, and cost-effective
- Collaborate across Zapier to ensure the platform supports the needs of internal teams building automation features, AI workflows, and more
- Establish and maintain strong platform stakeholder relationships through regular syncs, roadmap reviews, and clear documentation
- Coach and develop senior and staff-level engineers through 1:1s, mentorship, and growth planning
- Shape the quarterly and long-term technical roadmap for the Zap Execution platform, working closely with Product and Infrastructure partners
- Ensure your team adheres to Zapier’s engineering best practices, including security, reliability, and architectural guidelines
- Continuously improve the development and release processes through retrospectives, process refinements, and technical tooling
- Define and track metrics related to Zap execution success, reliability, and platform health, and communicate these to executive leadership to inform planning and prioritization
- Contribute to hiring and onboarding new engineers to the team and company
- Stay close to the user impact of platform changes by collaborating with support, product, and customer-facing teams
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: 31 October 2025 at 04:00 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.
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