Software Engineer, Backend-leaning Full Stack or Backend (Runner Team)

About Zapier

Were humans who simply think computers should do more work.

At Zapier were not just making softwarewere building a platform to help millions of businesses globally scale with automation and AI. Our mission is to make automation work for everyone by delivering products that delight our customers. Youll collaborate with brilliant people use the latest tools and leverage the flexibility of remote work. Your work will directly fuel our customers success and as they grow so will you.

Engineer Backend-leaning Full Stack or Backend

Job Posted: October 20th 2025

Location: North America

Hi there!

Zapiers Workflow Zone is responsible for the core engine that powers our automation platform. As more teams and organizations depend on Zapier to automate critical workflows were investing in scaling the capabilities reliability and intelligence of our core product experience. If youre passionate about building robust systems enabling advanced user workflows and shaping the future of automation wed love to hear from you.

The Runner team is responsible for ensuring the reliability consistency and scalability of Zap execution. Were focused on the core infrastructure that powers Zapiers workflows including scaling for high volume and reducing latency across millions of executions daily.

In this role youll:

• Develop and maintain Zapiers execution engine scaling it to handle millions of daily runs

• Improve system performance reduce latency and strengthen failure handling

• Design and implement execution primitives that power reliable automation

• Collaborate across infrastructure product and platform teams on core system design

Proposed amendments

• Design implement and scale Zapiers execution engine to support millions of daily task runs with high reliability and low latency.

• Optimize system performance through improved queuing strategies latency reduction and stronger fault tolerance.

• Architect and evolve core execution primitives that underpin reliable and observable automation at scale.

• Build resilient distributed systems on AWS with a focus on throughput failover and degradation handling.

• Develop and refine sharding and queuing strategies to ensure task fairness and efficient load distribution across the system.

• Implement coordinated work-packing techniques to effectively manage third-party service limits and partner API throttling.

• Collaborate with infrastructure product and platform teams on system design cross-cutting features and long-term architecture.

• Participate in on-call rotations and own time-to-execution SLAs ensuring fast and reliable task initiation across workflows.

This is a foundational team at the platform layerideal for engineers who like deep technical challenges and shipping resilient high-scale services.

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

High Visibility High Impact

If you thrive on building complex systems that are easy to use and hard to break this zone is for you:

• Work on foundational systems used by millions

• Help users build smarter more powerful automations

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams across Product Design and Support

• Join a high-ownership environment with clear user impact and fast iteration

About You

Were looking for experienced engineers who bring:

• Strong backend experience with Python building reliable scalable and observable distributed systems.

• Experience with infrastructure observability tooling (e.g. Databricks Looker Grafana Graylog) combining data engineering skills with a data-driven approach to reliability and team culture

• Experience architecting building debugging and operating distributed systems at scale is essential.

• Familiarity with AWS primitives including S3 SQS Lambda RDS etc.

• Familiarity with relational databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL and the ability to model query and optimize data effectively

• Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs building event-driven systems and working with data integrations across services

• Proven ability to lead complex technical projectsowning design decisions balancing tradeoffs and guiding implementation across multiple contributors

• You proactively coach and support teammates foster growth through mentorship and contribute to a culture of feedback and continuous improvement

• You navigate ambiguity with confidenceable to clarify priorities align stakeholders and drive toward meaningful outcomes even when goals shift

• Youve used AI tooling for work or personal use. You explore new tools workflows and ideas to make things more efficient and are eager to deepen your understanding of AI and use it regularly.