Engineer, Backend (Events)

Job Posted: 08/06/2024

Location: Remote (North America time zones (Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific)

Hi there!

At Zapier, our mission is to make work easier and more productive for everyone, and we'd love for you to join us to help make that happen! We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to join Team Events and help us build and enhance foundational event & queuing services that power fantastic products at Zapier. Our primary focus is to build and support our Events system at Zapier as well as other queueing solutions used by our internal teams at Zapier. Our services and components are critical, run at scale, and operate as a foundation to all of Zapier. Come join us on this mission!

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

About You

You have 4+ years with software development in either Python, Go, Typescript, with at least 2 years focused on building event / streaming systems at scale.  Your depth of expertise makes you a valuable asset to our engineering team.

Required Technical Skills/Experience:

1. Experience working with Events architectures and services based on technologies like Kafka (MSK) and Avro.  You have supported Events system infrastructure to ensure resiliency and up time.

2. Participated in the design or maintenance of highly available, cloud-based infrastructure in AWS or another cloud offering. You understand how to leverage infrastructure as code tools and have learned best practices for reliability and observability.  

3. Strong experience with AWS services, cloud computing technologies, and distributed data stores.

4. Experience with languages like Python or Go to create automated tools. You believe in hands-off deployments and infrastructure as code.

Nice-to-Have Skills/Experience:

1. Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking skills, combined with excellent collaboration and communication abilities.

2. A natural curiosity and eagerness to learn and explore new technologies and solutions.

3. SRE experience working with and supporting existing systems to ensure up time and reliability.

4. Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (e.g., using a tool like GitLab).

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 on problems that may not be well defined.  You are eager to jump in to learn, research, and propose options to consider when solving a hard problem that the team has not faced before.  You love researching new technology, experimenting with new ideas, and driving forward with implementation details.

You can balance lots of concerns. You will manage incoming work, prioritize tasks effectively, and stay organized. Your role is crucial in meeting project/internal customer demands and delivering reliable and well tested solutions all while working in a 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 embody 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 and collaborate to democratize automation.

Things You’ll Do

• Work with AWS services like MSK, SQS, Redis, S3, Lambda and Aurora to build scalable solutions that process billions of events per day. Use Terraform to maintain and build our infrastructure.

• Build toolkits, libraries, and scripts to ease challenges faced by other teams at Zapier when they wish to emit to and consume from the Events system as well as other queue solutions we are currently working on building.

• Contribute to data governance practices across Zapier.  Influence proper data structure and data hygiene.

• Refactor or improve existing code as languages, frameworks, or techniques evolve. Help the team pick appropriate tools to solve new problems as they arise.

• 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.

• 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 as needed.

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.