Database Reliability Engineer, Zapier

$138.3-207.5k

Salary applicable to both US and Canada. Offers Equity + Offers Bonus

AWS
Redis
Postgres
MySQL
Zapier
Keep
Senior level
Remote in Canada, US

More information about location

Zapier

Workflow automation service

Job no longer available

Zapier

Workflow automation service

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation

Job no longer available

$138.3-207.5k

Salary applicable to both US and Canada. Offers Equity + Offers Bonus

AWS
Redis
Postgres
MySQL
Zapier
Keep
Senior 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're an experienced database technologist with a background in PostgreSQL: You have at least 5 years of experience in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development, with at least 2 years of experience building and maintaining data services on PostgreSQL
  • You’re familiar with PostgreSQL ecosystem of extensions and third-party tools, and have leveraged them to build production systems
  • You know the cloud: You've designed and maintained highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform
  • We use tools like Postgres, MySQL, and Redis
  • You can code: You're comfortable automating solutions and building tools that eliminate repetitive tasks
  • You're not afraid to delve into application code to fix a bug or to launch a backend service to address a gap in our data management strategy
  • You can solve complex systems challenges: You take ownership of difficult problems, understand how to improve performance, and help uncover opportunities for improvement
  • You've worked on issues where “just throw more hardware at it” isn't enough for the system to scale
  • You're a great communicator: Not only do you know how to share your knowledge with the team and document things well so they can be consumed asynchronous (we do this a lot as a remote company), but you know how to communicate effectively with software and support teams
  • You value our values: At Zapier, our values are at the heart of how we work together and how we think about our customers
  • In our remote setting, they help develop trust and ensure we work together and collaborate to democratize automation
  • You see how these values can empower meaningful work, you thrive in a collaborative setting, you are eager to continue growing, and you're excited to be part of the team

What the job involves

  • We're seeking a Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to join our team in the Americas
  • As we continue to scale our product and grow our team, we're looking for experienced database-focused Engineers to be stewards of Zapier's databases
  • We need Engineers who can help architect our overall data infrastructure landscape but aren't afraid to get into the weeds to solve gnarly operational problems
  • Simultaneously, as Zapier is expanding the diversity of our product offerings and providing database-like tools to our customers (Tables, Transfer), you will help us to address operational challenges and provide direct support to developing new products
  • You'll help drive our best practices around automation, performance, reliability, and disaster recovery
  • Identifying and implementing strategies to improve performance and resilience. Our application is continually growing and we need your help to keep scaling
  • Working with development teams to make architectural decisions about new services and new technologies. Many of our new services use Postgres and teams need your help understanding how to best use it
  • Steamlining how developers get from zero to a scalable, performant, and secure database, so that they can focus on building great services
  • Monitoring use of our data layer and advising teams on how to use storage in a healthy and scalable way
  • Acting as a point of escalation for data-layer problems during production incidents
  • Things We've Done Recently:
  • Added new monitoring tooling across our fleet of RDS databases for improved observability
  • Rebuilt our connection pooling to our main production database to make it faster and easier to deploy config changes
  • Removed low-value code and tables from our system, cutting database traffic by 15%
  • Migrated portions of a shared EAV datastore into our relational databases, eliminating a single point of failure across multiple services
  • Helped a team developing a critical new service to ensure their database could scale with their expected traffic

Application process

  • Deadline to Apply 12 July 2024 at 05:00 BST

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

Founders

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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