Sr. Software Engineer, Workflow (Backend or FS-leaning Backend)

Zapier•San Francisco, CA

49d•Remote

About The Position

Zapier’s Workflow Zone is responsible for the core engine that powers our automation platform. As more teams and organizations depend on Zapier to automate critical workflows, we’re investing in scaling the capabilities, reliability, and intelligence of our core product experience. We’re hiring Sr. Backend Engineers and Sr. Fullstack Engineers (backend-leaning) to join several high-impact teams in the Workflow Zone. If you’re passionate about building robust systems, enabling advanced user workflows, and shaping the future of automation, we’d love to hear from you. The Workflow Zone is where Zapier’s automation magic happens. This zone owns the product experience and execution engine behind creating, running, and debugging workflows (Zaps). We’re focused on building powerful, flexible tools that help individuals and teams automate their work with speed and confidence. As automation use cases grow more complex—especially for Enterprise users—we’re evolving the platform to support more sophisticated logic, scalable execution, and AI-native experiences. This means: Building intuitive and resilient workflow authoring experiences Expanding execution capabilities and logic primitives Introducing AI-powered tools for creation and troubleshooting Improving reliability, observability, and control across the system We’re currently hiring for several teams across the zone, including: Editor Creation Runner Workflow Capabilities The Editor Creation team is reinventing how users build automations—laying the groundwork for a faster, smarter, and more intuitive workflow authoring experience. Rather than iterating on legacy patterns, this team is redesigning the editor's foundations to support new paradigms like AI-assisted creation and more advanced configuration options. The Troubleshooting team ensures automations run smoothly—and when they don’t, users have the tools to understand why. This team is focused on preventing, detecting, and resolving workflow errors with clarity and speed. The Runner team is responsible for reliably executing Zaps—fast. We’re focused on the core infrastructure that powers Zapier’s workflows, including scaling for high volume and reducing latency across millions of executions daily. The Workflow Capabilities team expands what workflows can do. We’re building system-level enhancements like branching logic, enterprise-aware rollouts, and smarter automation primitives that support more dynamic use cases.

Requirements

7+ years of professional experience developing software, including at least 2 years in a senior-level role
Strong backend experience, ideally in Python and Django and/or TypeScript and Node.js, building reliable, scalable, and observable services
For Full Stack roles: Advanced experience with React (and ideally frameworks like Next.js); you’re confident working across the stack and delivering cohesive user experiences
Familiarity with relational databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL, and the ability to model, query, and optimize data effectively
Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs, building event-driven systems, and working with data integrations across services
Proven ability to lead complex technical projects—owning design decisions, balancing tradeoffs, and guiding implementation across multiple contributors
You proactively coach and support teammates, foster growth through mentorship, and contribute to a culture of feedback and continuous improvement
You navigate ambiguity with confidence—able to clarify priorities, align stakeholders, and drive toward meaningful outcomes even when goals shift
You’ve used AI tooling for work or personal use—or you are willing to dive in and learn fast. You explore new tools, workflows, and ideas to make things more efficient, and are eager to deepen your understanding of AI and use it regularly.

Responsibilities

Redesign and modernize the Zap creation experience with performance, clarity, and scale in mind
Build flexible UI components and configuration flows that support both no-code and AI-assisted automation
Contribute to foundational infrastructure that enables new editor paradigms and future UX modularity
Collaborate across Product and Design to streamline the journey from idea to working automation
Build systems that proactively detect, surface, and explain errors in user workflows
Design clear, actionable debugging experiences to help users fix issues faster
Collaborate with Support to turn customer pain points into product improvements
Strengthen the zone’s culture of reliability, observability, and resilience
Develop and maintain Zapier’s execution engine, scaling it to handle millions of daily runs
Improve system performance, reduce latency, and strengthen failure handling
Design and implement execution primitives that power reliable automation
Collaborate across infrastructure, product, and platform teams on core system design
Build foundational logic tools like branching, conditional execution, and looping
Design and maintain system-level Zaps that power internal automation at Zapier
Partner with teams across the company to deliver reusable workflow primitives
Enhance configuration and control surfaces to support power users and enterprise scenarios