Director of Engineering, Infrastructure

Zapier•San Francisco, CA

1d•Remote

About The Position

As the Director of Engineering for Infrastructure, you’ll lead several multidisciplinary teams building, supporting, and evolving Zapier's core services, platforms, and infrastructure. Your work directly enables every product team at Zapier to move faster and build better quality products. This is a leadership role with scope to build. Zapier is investing in platform engineering as a strategic priority, and you'll shape what that looks like: vision, scalability, accountability mechanisms, and how the organization operates. Many of the processes and systems your teams need don't exist yet. You will build them, partnering closely with our VP of Engineering and dedicated Platform PMs. You'd be joining at a formative and transformational stage. This is a build role where you'll be responsible for shaping the direction, not inheriting a finished state. We're looking for someone energized by this kind of work: someone who sees a growing, evolving organization as an opportunity to make their mark and shape what comes next.

Requirements

You’ve built internal infrastructure platforms that engineering teams love to use.
You've led teams responsible for cloud, database, and event infrastructure.
You've built feedback loops with internal engineering customers that directly shaped your platform roadmap and investment priorities.
You understand that internal platforms are products, and you've treated them that way: measuring adoption, gathering feedback, and iterating towards customer delight based on developer needs.
You fundamentally rethink software development in an AI-first world.
You've used AI coding agents and orchestration tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar) hands-on and can demonstrate how you've applied them to transform your own work, your teams' output, and can quantify that impact.
You have a concrete vision for how AI will reshape infrastructure and developer tooling, and you've already started implementing it by rethinking roles, eliminating legacy workflows, and reallocating capacity based on where AI is headed.
You embed accountability and quality standards into AI-powered systems rather than lowering the bar for speed.
You iterate, refine, and critically evaluate AI outputs rather than accepting first-pass results and expect your team to do the same.
You've built teams and systems from the ground up, not just inherited and optimized them.
You thrive in 0-to-1 environments where you're making hard trade-offs, retooling teams, and creating structure where little existed before.
You have a track record of leading through organizational change and ambiguity, and you actively seek out those challenges.
You have a track record of deeply understanding your customers—internal developers, external partners, and cross-functional stakeholders.
You've built mechanisms to stay close to their needs and have used that insight to prioritize ruthlessly.
You're empathetic to the expectations of Zapier's customers and the needs of our developers.
You are a skilled engineering leader who has built teams responsible for internal developer platforms and the infrastructure that underpins them.
You've shaped how product engineering teams build and ship software by investing in the foundational infrastructure and platforms.
You've managed teams of managers and technical leaders, helping each be successful.
You understand the infrastructure underpinning your platforms well enough to make sound architectural tradeoffs, but your focus is on developer outcomes, not infrastructure for its own sake.
You've established data-driven approaches to measuring engineering velocity and quality both for your platform teams and for the product development teams they serve.
You understand the incompleteness and necessity of purely quantitative metrics and bring curiosity to maximize learning from them.
You've made the complex tradeoffs between velocity, cost, and functionality when building and supporting platforms.
You have vision and mechanisms to track and improve on Keep-The-Lights-On (KTLO) and reactive work in favour of increased investment in proactive and platform improvements.
You have a passion and track record of developing engineers and leaders.
You realize the best way to grow a team is by helping them grow themselves.
You're able to effectively share your experience and provide clear frameworks for growth.
You've developed the next generation of engineering leaders.
You communicate proactively, write clearly, and know when async works and when to jump on a call.
You lean on all of these tools to communicate vision, strategy, plans, findings, and results to engineering and the broader Zapier team.
You believe in systems and processes that let you scale impact beyond yourself and your immediate team.
You default to AI-first thinking when approaching new work and have built personal and team systems (copilots, workflows, or automations) that compound impact over time.

Responsibilities

A clear, shared vision for your organization that connects to internal developer needs and Zapier's overall strategy, with progress visible to leadership
Define and drive the strategy and long-term roadmap for your organization in collaboration with your teams and Engineering/Product leadership peers
Understand, measure, and articulate how your organization's work enables Zapier's product development velocity
Understand, measure and articulate how reactive and Keep-The-Lights-On (KTLO) work will be reduced in order to increase investment in high leverage platform improvements
Define and drive the AI transformation of your organization, re-architecting how platform engineering operates, how KTLO and reactive work is minimized, not just adding AI to existing workflows
Identify and implement AI-powered tooling and automation that accelerates developer velocity and quality for the broader organization
Set the pace for AI adoption across your teams; model the behaviors you expect from your engineers
Build repeatable systems and workflows with AI, not just one-off uses; turn experiments into durable capabilities
Unblock software delivery pain points specific to infrastructure through your organization's platforms, tooling, and partnership with product teams
Establish data-driven approaches to measuring delivery velocity and quality; work with stakeholders, peers, and engineering teams to own those measures and deliver ongoing improvements
Stakeholders and the broader org understand your organization's direction, tradeoffs, and results so they can plan and trust the platform
In partnership with service-owning teams, be accountable for the uptime of Zapier’s core infrastructure and take action if that uptime falters
Step in during major incidents at the director level by coordinating cross-functional resources and setting stakeholder expectations when severity demands senior leadership involvement
Teams that ship consistently and retain talent because the work is compelling and the culture supports growth
Managers and ICs have clear growth paths and the feedback they need to improve; you develop the next generation of leaders
Growing and developing your teams by recruiting, hiring, retaining, and mentoring
Own output and outcomes for your teams and the systems they own