Zapier is looking to transform its software products by leveraging data, aiming to make automation work for everyone and enable millions of businesses globally to scale with automation and AI. The Senior Data Engineer will play a key role in shaping how data is used within Zapier products, enhancing data access, and building robust APIs to support personalization, AI systems, usage analytics, and billing.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience designing, building and maintaining data systems and distributed systems in the cloud.
- Deep expertise in software engineering — designing APIs, data services, and distributed systems using robust testing, CI/CD, and observability practices.
- Highly proficient in Databricks, Spark, or similar platforms, using them to efficiently process large-scale data and optimize for performance and cost.
- Proficient in Python and/or Typescript, and strong in SQL.
- Follow best practices to write clean, efficient, and maintainable code throughout the full software development lifecycle.
- Define SLAs, build observability into pipelines and services, and establish standards for alerting, documentation, and on-call reliability for data systems.
Responsibilities
- Architect and Scale Data Systems: Lead the design and evolution of scalable, secure, and reliable data infrastructure and APIs that power user-facing product use cases.
- Define Data Architecture and Standards: Drive collaboration with engineering and analytics teams to optimize storage, processing workflows, and database schemas. Define data models and contracts to ensure consistency, accessibility, and scalability across systems.
- Drive Standards, Quality, and Governance: Design reliable, observable data systems with strong testing and validation. Help establish best practices, golden paths, and CI/CD workflows that uphold data quality, security, and continuous improvement.
- Performance Tuning, Maintenance and Optimization: Establish frameworks for continuous monitoring and optimization of the performance of data workflows, identifying and resolving bottlenecks in data ingestion, transformation, and storage. You will participate and improve the on-call rotation for data-owned services.
- Advance Reusability and Enablement: Identify the opportunity and develop shared tooling, frameworks, and libraries that empower other engineering teams to self-serve data and build on top of common data patterns safely and efficiently.
- Influence Technical Direction: Partner with the Engineering, Product and Data teams to define roadmaps and contribute to Zapier’s long-term data architecture and strategy.
- Lead and Mentor: Provide technical mentorship to data engineers and cross-functional peers. Review designs, guide implementation, and promote an engineering culture focused on quality, user impact, and ownership.
Other
- You’ll collaborate with brilliant people, use the latest tools, and leverage the flexibility of remote work.
- You communicate clearly in writing, mentor others and set strong technical and data standards that raise the bar across teams.
- You partner with engineering, analytics, ML, and AI teams, embracing innovation and AI to improve how we build software.
- You balance pragmatism with impact, shipping solutions that simply work and evolving them over time.
- 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.
