Backend Engineer, Zapier

Edge

CA$138.3-207.5k

Salary for US based candidates; $138,300 - $207,500 + Equity + Bonus

AWS
Python
Kafka
Redis
Excel
Terraform
MySQL
Prometheus
Grafana
Datadog
Mid and Senior level
Remote in Canada, US
Zapier

Workflow automation service

Job no longer available

Zapier

Workflow automation service

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation

Job no longer available

CA$138.3-207.5k

Salary for US based candidates; $138,300 - $207,500 + Equity + Bonus

AWS
Python
Kafka
Redis
Excel
Terraform
MySQL
Prometheus
Grafana
Datadog
Mid and Senior level
Remote in Canada, US

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation

Company mission

Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!

Role

Who you are

  • You have a solid foundation of experience. You bring over 4 years of experience, with at least 2 of those years dedicated to building distributed, scalable web applications. Your depth of expertise makes you a valuable asset to our engineering team
  • You excel in backend development. You have robust expertise in using Python to build web services and are proficient in working with AWS, especially Lambda and other cloud technologies. You have hands-on experience with event-based technologies like Kafka or SQS and are skilled in database performance optimization and query tuning with MySQL. Familiarity with caching solutions such as Memcached or Redis further highlights your technical prowess
  • You are proficient in performance monitoring and optimization. You use tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Datadog for monitoring system performance, identifying bottlenecks, and ensuring optimal operation of our services
  • You appreciate the value of DevOps practices. Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (e.g., using GitLab and Terraform) is a plus, as well as proficiency in implementing and securing authentication and authorization mechanisms (OAuth, JWT, 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 notice 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

What the job involves

  • Directly impact how our customers can be more productive by building, supporting, and scaling triggers and actions, 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
  • Provide feedback on tools, processes, and documentation in place to help us become a better, more effective organization
  • Work with your colleagues to develop 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
  • Participate in on-call rotations to ensure the reliability and availability of our systems, providing timely and effective support when issues arise
  • 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

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 headshot

Freddie

Company Specialist

Insights

Top investors

Many candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

38% employee growth in 12 months

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.

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 & Inclusion at Zapier

Maggie Roque headshot

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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