Staff Engineer, Site Reliability

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.

Job Posted: 08/15/2025

Location: North America

Zapier's Internal Platform exists to provide engineers with a reliable, frictionless foundation to build, ship, and operate software. We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer with deep observability expertise and a proven track record of leading company-wide change. You’ll join our Reliability Platform team, where we own incident response, service ownership, and observability, and you’ll play a pivotal role in strengthening Zapier’s posture across all three.

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

Why This Role Matters

This isn’t just an infrastructure or tooling role. We're looking for someone to set and drive a multi-year reliability strategy that enables Zapier engineers to deliver reliable products at scale. You'll need to influence organizational culture and practice—shaping how engineers instrument, monitor, debug, and learn from their systems.

You’ll be a technical leader across teams and a mentor to engineers tackling complex systems problems. You won’t just build observability tools—you’ll define what “good” looks like, partner with service teams to get there, and help elevate reliability practices across the organization.

About You

• You’re a seasoned engineer. You have 10+ years of experience in systems engineering and software development, including Staff+ level roles where you’ve led broadly scoped, high-impact initiatives.

• You’re a builder first. You lead through hands-on contribution and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves to make things happen. You thrive on jumping in alongside product teams to solve problems directly, unblock adoption of platform practices, and demonstrate what “good” looks like by building it. You’re energized by executing—not just advising.

• Observability is your craft. You have deep, hands-on experience designing and operationalizing observability systems across metrics, logs, traces, and profiling. You understand what it takes to turn telemetry into actionable insight—and build a culture that values it.

• You lead systemic change. You've defined and driven adoption of practices like SLOs, golden paths, and instrumentation standards across multiple teams or organizations. You’ve helped teams evolve from reactive to proactive reliability.

• You design for scale and ambiguity. You can design systems and solutions in complex, high-scale environments—where priorities are fluid and ambiguity is the norm.

• You’re a strategic thinker. You can define a long-term vision and identify incremental paths to achieve it. You balance business goals, technical constraints, and developer experience.

• You are customer- and team-oriented. You have empathy for both internal engineers and the end users they serve. You’re able to translate needs across organizational layers, balancing tactical team needs with strategic business impact. You collaborate effectively with ICs, EMs, and executives alike, and you build trust by listening first and aligning on outcomes.

• You’re a strong communicator. You’re great at tailoring communication to different audiences—whether writing RFCs, mentoring engineers, or aligning leaders on tradeoffs and priorities.

• You are an AI power user. You proactively embrace AI as a core part of your engineering toolkit and are excited to explore new ways it can accelerate learning, development, and operations. You don’t just use AI—you advocate for it, sharing your workflows and helping others level up.

Things You’ll Do

• Lead Zapier’s observability strategy. Define standards and best practices for instrumentation, telemetry, alerting, and visibility. Build prototypes, drive adoption, and work directly with engineers to embed observability into their workflows.

• Accelerate platform adoption. Actively partner with product and platform teams to remove friction in adopting golden paths for observability, service ownership, and incident response. Where adoption lags, jump in and help build the missing pieces.

• Elevate our incident lifecycle. Help teams prevent, detect, and respond to incidents more effectively, and strengthen how we analyze and learn from them.

• Mentor and guide engineers. Share your expertise across the SRE and broader engineering org. Uplevel teams’ understanding of reliability principles, observability tooling, and service ownership practices.

• Influence service maturity. Contribute to shaping what “owning a service” means at Zapier—including improving how engineers measure and understand reliability.

• Drive platform-wide projects. Collaborate across infrastructure, product, and data teams on initiatives like distributed tracing, centralized logging, or unified health dashboards.

• Act as a reliability steward. Partner with other Staff Engineers and Engineering Leaders to evolve Zapier’s engineering practices and reliability posture at scale.

• Champion AI integration. Use AI tools to optimize development, debugging, analysis, and documentation workflows—and support others in doing the same.

Our Stack & Tools

• Cloud & Infra: AWS, Kubernetes, Redis, Kafka, Terraform

• Observability: Grafana, Datadog, Opensearch, Prometheus, Sentry

• Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript

• CI/CD & Source Control: GitLab, ArgoCD

What Success Looks Like

• Observability is seen not as a platform function, but as an engineering-wide discipline.

• Zapier teams can confidently answer: “Is my service healthy?”

• SLOs are not only defined, but actively used to guide engineering decisions.

• Incidents are detected faster, recur less, and are learned from more effectively.

• Teams feel empowered and supported in owning the reliability of their systems.

• AI tooling is embedded across reliability workflows, increasing speed, quality, and experience.

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 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.

Education is not a requirement for our roles; however, if you receive an offer, you will need to include your most recent educational experience as part of our background check process.

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 prioritizes the security of our customers' information and is dedicated to adhering to all applicable data privacy laws. You can review our privacy policy here.

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 [email protected].

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.