Sr. Engineer, Backend

Job Posted: 2/9/24 

Location: Americas 

Hi there!

As Zapier continues to scale our mission to democratize automation, we’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to the Edge team.  

The Edge team is focused on building internal automation services that serve as a basis to power fantastic products. Our services are critical, run at scale, and under the hood power all of Zapier. We run at the edge of Zapier’s system boundary, handling both incoming traffic and outgoing requests to our partners.

Zapier’s on a mission to make everyone more productive at work. Zapier has helped millions of people build businesses through the power of automation.

If you’re interested in advancing your career at a fast-growing, profitable, impact-driven company, then read on…

We know applying for and taking on a new job at any company requires a leap of faith. We want you to feel comfortable and excited to apply at Zapier. To help share a bit more about life at Zapier, here are a few resources in addition to the job description that can give you an inside look at what life is like at Zapier. Hopefully, you'll take the leap of faith and apply.

Our Commitment to Applicants

Culture and Values at Zapier

Zapier Guide to Remote Work

Zapier Code of Conduct

Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

Zapier is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

Even though our job description may seem like we're looking for a specific candidate, the role inevitably ends up tailored to the person who applies and joins. Regardless of how well you feel you fit our description, we encourage you to apply if you meet these criteria:

 

About You

You have 7+ years of experience. You've dedicated at least 4 of those years to building distributed,  scalable web applications.

Required Technical Skills/Experience:

1. Strong expertise in using Python for building web services.
2. Strong experience with AWS and cloud technologies, especially Lambda 
3. Experience working with Kafka, SQS, or other event based technologies
4. Experience in working with MySQL, with skills in database performance optimization and query tuning.
5. Experience working with Memcached or Redis
6. Using tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Datadog and for monitoring and performance optimization, and to identify and address performance bottlenecks.

Nice-to-Have Technical Skills/Experience:

1. Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (e.g., using a tool like GitLab and Terraform).
2. Proficiency in implementing and securing authentication and authorization mechanisms, such as OAuth, JWT, role-based access control (RBAC), and session management.

You value collaboration. You understand that building modern software is a team sport, and you enjoy working as part of a tight-knit team. You’re happy to pitch in and help the team, whether by reviewing code, pairing on a tricky problem, or just thinking about how to solve the challenges we’re facing.

You value exploration and versatility. You are comfortable working in other teams’ codebases to achieve the Edge team’s goals. This will involve embedding yourself in the other team, becoming familiar with their developer workflow, and collaborating with stakeholders on the other team to implement your solutions.

You can balance lots of concerns. Our team manages a wide variety of services catering to a broad spectrum of internal clients. You'll be expected to adeptly balance incoming work to address these services, prioritizing them ruthlessly yet judiciously. Your ability to manage this diversity without being overwhelmed is crucial, ensuring not only that we meet our varied demands but also consistently deliver high-quality, impactful results in our dynamic, fast-paced environment.

You advocate for the user. You have a keen eye for great design, and you’re empathetic to the needs of the end-user. When you see users struggling to succeed you take it as a personal challenge to understand why and help the team build a better product.

You love learning new things. You love researching new tech and driving forward with the implementation details. 

 

Things You Might Do

Zapier is a small, fast-growing, and remote-first company, so you'll likely get experience on many different projects across the organization. That said, here are some things you'll probably do:

• Directly impact how our customers can be more productive by building and supporting the foundational building blocks of Zapier.
• Work with AWS services like SQS, Redis, S3, Lambda and MSK to build scalable solutions that process millions of requests. Use Terraform to maintain and build our infrastructure.
• Refactor or improve existing code as languages, frameworks, or techniques evolve. Help the team pick appropriate tools to solve new problems as they arise.
• Work closely with our product, design, and frontend teams to create amazing and intuitive experiences that make it effortless to connect different apps together.
• Help put tools, processes, and documentation in place to help us become a better, more effective organization.
• Help teach your colleagues new skills, through code review, discussions and mentoring. Help us all become better engineers and humans.
• Ship to hundreds of thousands of users every day while having lots of autonomy in terms of code and feature ownership.
• As a part of Zapier's all-hands philosophy, help customers via support to ensure they have the best experience possible.

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.

 

Zapier Compensation Guiding Principles

We believe all Zapiens should be rewarded competitively and equitably, using practices that are simple and transparent. This philosophy ensures we’re able to find, grow, and retain exceptional people from a broad range of backgrounds. Here’s how we define our compensation principles:

• Competitive: Zapier pays well among the technology sector.
• Equitable: Consistent pay practices; competency-based pay.
• Simple: Pay is well understood, and pay practices are built for scale.
• Transparent: Zapiens know how pay works, including how their pay is determined.

The pay ranges for this role are:

United States: $167,000 - $251,000 USD

Canada: $167,000 - $251,000 CAD

A Candidate's compensation package is finalized once the interview process is concluded and accounts for experience, competencies (job knowledge, skills and abilities) and internal equity. We use a competency-based approach to base pay, which means we set pay for all Zapier employees based on their competency and skills demonstrated in their role. In alignment with that philosophy, the upper half of a pay range is typically reserved for individuals who have consistently demonstrated a high level of job knowledge and skills for their current role and level while at Zapier.

For more information on Zapier’s Total Rewards please click here.

 

How to Apply

At Zapier, we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us better, which is why we have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. We're looking for the best fit for each of our roles, regardless of the type of education or companies in your background, so we encourage you to apply even if your skills and experiences don’t exactly match the job description. 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!

Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and we're excited to work with talented and empathetic people of all identities. Zapier does not discriminate based on someone's identity in any aspect of hiring or employment as required by law and in line with our commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be, and we celebrate our differences because those differences are what allow us to make a product that serves a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.

Zapier is committed to inclusion. As part of this commitment, Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact jobs@zapier.com.

Application Deadline: The anticipated application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later, or if the position is filled.

Even though we’re an all-remote company, we still need to be thoughtful about where we have Zapiens working. Check out this resource for a list of countries where we currently cannot have Zapiens permanently working.

#LI-Remote