Description
We're looking for someone to join our Engineering and DevOps team at Zapier. Are you interested in helping scale and automate (https://zapier.com/engineering/automating-billions-of-tasks/) the billions of tasks connecting the world's business data? Then read on...About You
You are a hybrid software engineer. You can cross systems, DevOps, and application software boundaries. You have a history of shipping high-quality production code in Python. You are skilled working directly on the command line. You are embrace automation and take pride in building internal tools to help your team be more efficient. You are not afraid to jump into application code to ship a new feature or infrastructure code to help scale a system.
You solve challenges involving scaling, reliability, high availability, data pipelines, micro-services, and more in your day-to-day work. You are comfortable building and scaling applications on one or more technologies that make up our AWS stack, including Python, Django, RabbitMQ, Zookeeper, Docker, Kafka, Redis, Memcache, Postgres, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible and more.
You have experience working with databases. You are comfortable modeling database schemas and writing queries across a variety of data sources. You are able to work with data scientists to help understand what's happening in a production system and how to use it intelligently.
You have worked with teams before scaling large projects. You understand that automation plays a critical role in scaling. You have designed and implemented systems in a distributed manner and are comfortable scaling these systems across hundreds (and even thousands) of servers. You have no problem keeping systems like these running even while you sleep...because you've automated it.
You love doing things efficiently. At Zapier, the work you do will have a disproportionate impact on the business. We believe in systems and processes that let us scale our impact to be larger than ourselves.
You love learning. Engineering is an ever-evolving world. You enjoy playing with new tech and exploring areas that you might not have experience with yet.
You love to set your own direction. At Zapier, we have one team meeting each week and one-on-one meetings every month. Between those we chat in Slack and then go make things happen.
You are friendly and patient, welcoming, considerate, and respectful. Learn more about these attributes in our code of conduct (https://zapier.com/jobs/zapier-code-of-conduct/).
Things You Might Do
Zapier is a startup, so you'll likely get experience on many different projects across the organization. Here are some things you'll get a taste of:
- Be an important member of our Engineering and DevOps team, working to scale our fast growing and unique system
- Write application code to support new features
- Build tooling to increase visibility into our running production systems, measure performance continuously, and act upon changes
- Automate disaster recovery efforts, including introducing random "chaos" into the system to test and improve overall resiliency to failures
- Tune the engine that supports hundreds of thousands of users every day
- Give back to the community via open source and blog posts
- Help customers via support to ensure they have the best experience possible
About Zapier
For the past four years, Zapier has been helping people across the world automate the boring and tedious parts of their job. We do that by helping everyone connect the web applications they already use and love.
We believe that there are jobs a computer is best at doing and that there are jobs a human is best at doing. We want to empower businesses to create processes and systems that let computers do what they are best at doing and let humans do what they are best at doing.
We believe that with the right tools, you can have big impact with less hassle.
We believe in small teams. Small teams are fast and nimble. Small teams mean less bureaucracy and less management and more getting things done.
We believe that credentials don't say everything. Our CTO has a finance degree. Our CEO has an engineering degree. Our CPO has a mechanical engineering degree. What you love doing is way more important than the credentials you have.
The Whole Package
Location: Planet Earth.
If you want to work remote, that's great. If you want to work near others, that's cool too. Our team is distributed across California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois and the UK because it lets us work with the best people. You don't have to be located in the USA either. Some team members live in the United Kingdom, Thailand, New Zealand and Australia. You just have to be talented!
Compensation:
- Competitive salary (we don't use remote as an excuse to pay less)
- Great healthcare + dental + vision coverage
- Retirement plan with 4% company match
- Profit sharing
- 2-3 annual company retreats to awesome places
- 14 weeks paid leave for new parents
Pick your own equipment. We'll set you up with whatever laptop + monitor combo you want plus any software you need.
Unlimited vacation policy (plus we insist you take at least 2 weeks off each year - this isn't a vague policy where unlimited vacation means no vacation). Work-life balance is really important to everyone at Zapier - we believe it and practice it!
Work with awesome companies around the world. We partner great software companies all over the world and you'll constantly get to interact with people from these great companies (https://zapier.com/zapbook).
How to Apply
Applying is fairly straightforward, but a bit unique. These questions help us dig right into the good stuff rather than wasting time on informational follow-up interviews.
- Send an email to the address below.
- Tell us about yourself (include how you heard about Zapier and the position)
- Tell us about the most difficult API/library/software bug you've squashed (we love troubleshooting stories)
- Tell us about a technically impressive thing you've built
- Tell us about the largest deployment you've worked on
- Tell us about your favorite technology to work with
- Include links to your portfolio/Github profile or provide us with 500+ LOC to help us get a feel for how you write code
- Zapier operates at scale and does some pretty interesting things, rank the following in order from what you'd do best, the first being the best. Disregard priority or importance considerations and focus on your skillset and excitement:
a. build a distributed service that executes 30k untrusted node.js scripts every minute
b. build a persisted cron-like tool to handle dispatching 100k jobs per minute
c. write raw queries and scripts for displaying data on a real-time dashboard
d. create a real-time system to alert us of subtle or unexpected API misbehavior
e. write a user facing tool that can categorize & diagnose common API issues across 500+ APIs
f. build a micro-service to store and query user event metrics
g. implement a new feature that spans both frontend/backend code
Finally, wait for us to reply. It can take some time to read through all the applications, but we do and we reply to everyone, even if it don't seem like a great fit.
We're excited and look forward to hearing from you soon!