Incident Operations Specialist

Zapier • San Francisco, CA

7d • $119,000 - $178,500 • Remote

About The Position

As Zapier expands into the enterprise market and accelerates AI-driven development, incident management is a front-line function for customer trust and operational reliability. The Incident Operations Specialist role is the engine that keeps the day-to-day operation of Zapier's incident program running — reliably, visibly, and at scale.

You'll report to the Incident Program Manager and operate under their direction, owning the execution of the systems, workflows, and tooling that power incident response across Zapier. You are the person in the operations center: you keep things moving, you surface what's broken, and you use AI to build automation that lets a small team operate like a much larger one.

This isn't a pure engineering role; it's an ops role with technical depth. The right person thinks in systems, writes automation to scale their own work. They use AI as a default, build repeatable workflows, and leave things more reliable than they found them.

The role is particularly exciting because decisions here ripple across Zapier, shaping how we manage a key process that involves the whole company.

Requirements

• Experience in incident response, technical operations, or a reliability-adjacent role
• Hands-on familiarity with incident tooling (incident.io, PagerDuty or equivalent), and Slack-based workflow automation
• Comfortable building with SQL and reporting tools (Databricks, Looker, Grafana)
• Able to diagnose operational issues using logs, system context, and integration debugging
• Can build lightweight automations, configure APIs, and prototype AI workflows — doesn't require an engineer to do it for them
• Demonstrably uses AI in daily work: for drafting, summarizing, building workflows, and triaging
• Has built repeatable AI-powered workflows (not just one-off prompts)
• Applies verification and judgment to AI outputs — especially in high-pressure incident contexts
• Can articulate how their AI usage has improved speed, quality, or operational capacity
• Independently drives problems to resolution when direction is clear but the path requires investigation
• Strong attention to detail in configuration, data quality, and documentation
• Works visibly — status in public channels, proactive updates, no need to chase
• Proven track record of respectfully disagreeing and committing — you raise concerns early, then execute once a decision is made.
• Clear written communication across orgs like engineering, support, and ops audiences
• Proactive in surfacing risks, blockers, and improvement opportunities
• Comfortable pushing back on off-program requests and escalating trade-offs
• Able to communicate highly technical incident information to non-technical audiences — Support teams, GTM partners, and leadership — clearly and without jargon.

Responsibilities

• Own incident tooling operations. Maintain the reliability and configuration of incident.io, PagerDuty, Slack-based workflows, on-call rotations, and escalation paths. Monitor integrations and automations for issues. Fix what breaks.
• Build and maintain AI-powered workflows. Design and ship repeatable automation: incident thread summarization, postmortem draft generation, follow-up triage, severity classification, and data hygiene workflows. Turn one-off experiments into durable systems that compound over time. Keep improving them.
• Build and sustain the IC community. Grow and maintain a community of practice for Incident Commanders and Support Leads. Run regular touchpoints, share learnings across incidents, and coach responders on what good looks like. You are a resource others come to — not just a system operator.
• Operate data and reporting systems. Build, maintain, and troubleshoot dashboards and reports (Databricks, Grafana, Looker). Ensure data quality, field completeness, and metric accuracy. Surface trends and operational signals to the Incident Program Manager before they become problems.
• Maintain documentation and enablement assets. Keep playbooks, templates, and incident guides current and usable under pressure. Flag gaps where program-level guidance needs updating. Be the go-to resource for questions about tooling and process.
• Drive continuous improvement. Participate in incidents and postmortem reviews. Identify patterns across incidents. Implement improvements based on hands-on observation. Surface recurring friction to the Incident Program Manager with recommended solutions, not just problems.
• Partner across the org. Incidents touch Engineering, Support, GTM, Legal, and Finance. You coordinate across these teams without needing the Program Manager to broker every conversation. You know who to loop in, when, and how to communicate what they need to act.
• Support the incident program at scale. As the program expands to cover Support, Legal, PR, and Finance, help onboard and enable new stakeholder groups. Build the infrastructure that lets the program run self-sufficiently — including during your own PTO.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed