Engineering Manager, Runner

About Zapier

We're humans who simply think computers should do more work.

At Zapier, we’re not just making software—we’re 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. You’ll 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.

Hi there!

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to join the team at Zapier. We’re on a mission to make everyone more productive at work. Zapier has helped millions of people build businesses through the power of automation.

Zapier's Runner team owns the Zap Execution platform — the engine that powers millions of automated workflows (Zaps) every single day. As the Engineering Manager for Runner, you'll be leading a team at the heart of Zapier’s automation infrastructure. Your team ensures that Zaps run reliably, efficiently, and at scale, while evolving the system to support new product capabilities and performance requirements.

This platform is mission-critical: any improvement or regression in the execution pipeline has a ripple effect across Zapier’s customer base. Leading the Runner team means driving innovations that make the platform more resilient, scalable, and developer-friendly — while partnering closely with internal stakeholders who build on top of it.

If you're passionate about high-scale distributed systems, building platform capabilities for other engineers, and coaching senior engineers on tough, systems-level challenges, this role could be a great fit.

• 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 deep experience building and operating complex distributed systems at scale. You’ve worked in high-volume production environments and bring a strong reliability mindset. You treat outages as opportunities to improve and invest in system-wide visibility, graceful degradation, and operational excellence.

• You’ve built and led platform teams. You understand how to build infrastructure consumed by other product teams, and you're skilled at managing internal customer relationships through effective feedback loops, rituals, and roadmap planning.

• You lead senior engineers through strategy and mentorship. You’ve managed and grown high-performing engineers at the senior and staff levels, helping them scale their impact while driving alignment around a cohesive technical direction.

• You’re customer- and data-driven. You understand the downstream impact of infrastructure changes on end users, and you define and monitor success metrics that reflect reliability and business value. You're confident adapting priorities month-to-month based on what the data tells you and clearly communicate tradeoffs to peers and executives.

• You’re comfortable with our tech stack. You have hands-on experience with Python and have built systems using AWS services like SQS, S3, and Lambda, optimizing for both performance and cost.

• You collaborate with clarity and empathy. You bring teams together, working across product, design, support, and infrastructure to solve problems. You communicate complex ideas in a simple way, and you're skilled at keeping stakeholders informed and aligned.

• You think like a product owner. You know how to shape and prioritize a platform roadmap that supports long-term technical health while unlocking new capabilities for internal builders. You make room for foundational investments like tech debt paydown while delivering user-facing improvements.

Things You’ll Do

• Lead the Runner team: support a group of experienced engineers in building and evolving Zapier’s Zap Execution platform.

• Drive platform excellence: ensure the execution pipeline is robust, observable, performant, and cost-effective.

• Collaborate across Zapier to ensure the platform supports the needs of internal teams building automation features, AI workflows, and more.

• Establish and maintain strong platform stakeholder relationships through regular syncs, roadmap reviews, and clear documentation.

• Coach and develop senior and staff-level engineers through 1:1s, mentorship, and growth planning.

• Shape the quarterly and long-term technical roadmap for the Zap Execution platform, working closely with Product and Infrastructure partners.

• Ensure your team adheres to Zapier’s engineering best practices, including security, reliability, and architectural guidelines.

• Continuously improve the development and release processes through retrospectives, process refinements, and technical tooling.

• Define and track metrics related to Zap execution success, reliability, and platform health, and communicate these to executive leadership to inform planning and prioritization.

• Contribute to hiring and onboarding new engineers to the team and company.

• Stay close to the user impact of platform changes by collaborating with support, product, and customer-facing teams.