Engineer, Backend (Events Team)

AI at Zapier

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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!

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.

• 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.

Required Technical Skills/Experience:

• Experience working with event architectures and services based on technologies like Kafka (MSK) and Avro. You have supported event-system infrastructure to ensure resiliency and uptime.

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

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

• 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:

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

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

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

• Experience working with queues in the cloud or SAAS solutions. SQS experience is highly preferred.

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

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.