Zapier is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead their Developer Impact team, which is tasked with improving the effectiveness and velocity of their engineering organization by applying insights and innovations in development tooling and processes, with a strong emphasis on AI-powered developer workflows and cutting-edge productivity tooling. The goal is to ensure Zapier's developers have amazing internal tools and processes to build the future of automation with velocity and confidence.
Requirements
- You’ve shipped production code and have a solid grasp of modern software development practices.
- You have hands-on familiarity with things like CI/CD pipelines, version control, code review processes, and cloud infrastructure.
- You’ve likely built or improved internal tools or automation for a dev team before, so you can dive into technical discussions and guide your team in making sound engineering decisions.
- You have interest or experience in applying AI/ML to developer workflows.
- Maybe you’ve used AI coding assistants, automated testing tools, or other AI-driven development aids – or you’re eager to learn and adopt them.
- You stay curious about emerging tech (AI included) that can reduce developer toil and improve efficiency.
Responsibilities
- Lead the Developer Impact team: Manage and mentor a small, nimble team of engineers dedicated to developer productivity. You’ll set the vision and direction, and keep the team focused on high-impact projects.
- Identify & Eliminate Friction: Work closely with engineers on product teams to discover pain points in their day-to-day development process. You’ll solicit feedback through surveys, shadowing, and conversations, then prioritize and address the biggest friction points to dramatically increase developer velocity across Zapier.
- Champion the “Golden Path”: Collaborate with our internal platform teams to define and promote a golden path of best practices, standardized tech stacks, service templates, and frameworks. You’ll drive adoption of these standards, making it easier for engineers to do the right thing by default when building new services or features.
- Own Internal Documentation & Templates: Oversee Zapier’s internal developer documentation strategy, ensuring engineers have clear, discoverable guides for how we build software. Your team will maintain up-to-date service templates, example apps, and reference implementations so that starting a new project is frictionless and consistent.
- Apply AI to Developer Workflows: Explore, experiment with, and implement AI-powered tooling to solve real development challenges. This could mean integrating AI assistants into code editors or code review processes, using machine learning to optimize test pipelines, or prototyping chatbots that help developers find information faster. You’ll bring practical AI solutions to bear on our software development lifecycle.
- Build Lightweight, Adaptable Tools: Create and maintain a suite of internal tools and automations that make our engineers’ lives easier – from command-line utilities to CI/CD enhancements. You’ll ensure these solutions are lightweight and well-documented, and you’ll dogfood them within the team first to iterate quickly based on real-world use.
- Continuous Feedback & Iteration: Establish feedback loops with the engineering organization. You’ll gather input and usage data on the tools and processes your team introduces, measure their impact (e.g. reductions in build times, improved deploy frequency, developer satisfaction), and iterate rapidly. Success for this team means high adoption and tangible improvements in how quickly and safely we ship code.
Other
- You have experience leading teams focused on developer productivity, developer experience, or internal platforms.
- You treat internal engineers as your customers – empathizing with their pain points and delivering solutions that make their work easier and faster.
- You’re a proven engineering leader (with a few years of management under your belt) who knows how to hire, develop, and retain great talent.
- You thrive in a hypothesis-driven environment.
- You love to experiment with new tools or processes to improve workflow, measure the results with data, and iterate based on what you learn. Change doesn’t scare you – you embrace it as an opportunity to improve and leverage new ideas.
- You think like a product manager when it comes to internal tooling.
- You build strong relationships across teams.
- You can align with Product, Design, Infrastructure, and other stakeholders on a shared vision for engineering excellence.
- You communicate complex ideas with clarity and ensure your team’s work and impact are understood across the organization.
- You’re adept at gathering feedback from others and explaining the “why” behind decisions.
- You love helping engineers level up.
- You provide coaching, constructive feedback, and mentorship to your team, and you encourage a culture of continuous learning.
- You have a knack for identifying people’s strengths and developing opportunities for them to shine.
- Work closely with Zapier’s broader AI initiatives and other platform engineering teams.
- Share insights and tooling between teams, avoid duplication of effort, and align internal developer experience improvements with the company’s overall technology strategy.
- Champion developer experience at Zapier.
- Communicate your team’s plans, progress, and wins to the rest of the company through updates, demos, and documentation.
- Part of your job is evangelizing the value of internal tooling and ensuring that engineering leadership is aware of the leverage your team provides.
- Participate in hiring processes for your team and others.
- You’ll help attract diverse talent, conduct interviews, and smoothly onboard new hires so they quickly feel at home and productive at Zapier.
- 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.
- 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.
