Staff Engineer, Site Reliability

Zapier; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech company specializing in automation is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to drive observability and reliability practices across the organization. The ideal candidate has over 10 years of experience in systems engineering and software development, with deep expertise in observability systems and a passion for mentoring teams. This role offers the challenge of shaping engineering culture and practices to enhance product reliability.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Remote work opportunities

Inclusive work environment

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in systems engineering and software development.
• Hands-on experience with observability systems including metrics, logs, and traces.
• Ability to lead systemic change in engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Define standards and best practices for observability.
• Mentor and guide engineers on reliability principles.
• Drive platform-wide projects on observability and service ownership.

Skills

Systems engineering

Software development

Observability expertise

Leadership

Strategic thinking

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Grafana

Datadog

Go

Python

Job description

About Zapier

Zapier is building a platform to help millions of businesses globally scale with automation and AI. Our mission is to make automation work for everyone by delivering products that delight our customers. You’ll collaborate with brilliant people, use the latest tools, and leverage the flexibility of remote work. Your work will directly fuel our customers’ success, and as they grow, so will you.

Job Posted: 10/8/2025

Location: NAMER

Want to learn more about working at Zapier?

We know we have a lot of competition for your skills. If you’re wondering what things would be like at Zapier, read on about:

• Our Commitment to Applicants
• Culture and Values at Zapier
• Zapier Guide to Remote Work
• Zapier Code of Conduct
• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Zapier\'s Internal Platform exists to provide engineers with a reliable, frictionless foundation to build, ship, and operate software. We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer with deep observability expertise and a proven track record of leading company-wide change. You’ll join our Reliability Platform team, where we own incident response, service ownership, and observability, and you’ll play a pivotal role in strengthening Zapier’s posture across all three.

Why This Role Matters

This isn’t just an infrastructure or tooling role. We\'re looking for someone to set and drive a multi-year reliability strategy that enables Zapier engineers to deliver reliable products at scale. You\'ll need to influence organizational culture and practice—shaping how engineers instrument, monitor, debug, and learn from their systems.

You’ll be a technical leader across teams and a mentor to engineers tackling complex systems problems. You won’t just build observability tools—you’ll define what “good” looks like, partner with service teams to get there, and help elevate reliability practices across the organization.

About You

• You’re a seasoned engineer. You have 10+ years of experience in systems engineering and software development, including Staff+ level roles where you’ve led broadly scoped, high-impact initiatives.
• You’re a builder first. You lead through hands-on contribution and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves to make things happen. You thrive on jumping in alongside product teams to solve problems directly, unblock adoption of platform practices, and demonstrate what “good” looks like by building it. You’re energized by executing—not just advising.
• Observability is your craft. You have deep, hands-on experience designing and operationalizing observability systems across metrics, logs, traces, and profiling. You understand what it takes to turn telemetry into actionable insight—and build a culture that values it.
• You lead systemic change. You've defined and driven adoption of practices like SLOs, golden paths, and instrumentation standards across multiple teams or organizations. You’ve helped teams evolve from reactive to proactive reliability.
• You design for scale and ambiguity. You can design systems and solutions in complex, high-scale environments—where priorities are fluid and ambiguity is the norm.
• You’re a strategic thinker. You can define a long-term vision and identify incremental paths to achieve it. You balance business goals, technical constraints, and developer experience.
• You are customer- and team-oriented. You have empathy for both internal engineers and the end users they serve. You’re able to translate needs across organizational layers, balancing tactical team needs with strategic business impact. You collaborate effectively with ICs, EMs, and executives alike, and you build trust by listening first and aligning on outcomes.
• You’re a strong communicator. You’re great at tailoring communication to different audiences—whether writing RFCs, mentoring engineers, or aligning leaders on tradeoffs and priorities.
• You are an AI power user. You proactively embrace AI as a core part of your engineering toolkit and are excited to explore new ways it can accelerate learning, development, and operations. You don’t just use AI—you advocate for it, sharing your workflows and helping others level up.

Things You’ll Do

• Lead Zapier’s observability strategy. Define standards and best practices for instrumentation, telemetry, alerting, and visibility. Build prototypes, drive adoption, and work directly with engineers to embed observability into their workflows.
• Accelerate platform adoption. Actively partner with product and platform teams to remove friction in adopting golden paths for observability, service ownership, and incident response. Where adoption lags, jump in and help build the missing pieces.
• Elevate our incident lifecycle. Help teams prevent, detect, and respond to incidents more effectively, and strengthen how we analyze and learn from them.
• Mentor and guide engineers. Share your expertise across the SRE and broader engineering org. Uplevel teams’ understanding of reliability principles, observability tooling, and service ownership practices.
• Influence service maturity. Contribute to shaping what “owning a service” means at Zapier—including improving how engineers measure and understand reliability.
• Drive platform-wide projects. Collaborate across infrastructure, product, and data teams on initiatives like distributed tracing, centralized logging, or unified health dashboards.
• Act as a reliability steward. Partner with other Staff Engineers and Engineering Leaders to evolve Zapier’s engineering practices and reliability posture at scale.
• Champion AI integration. Use AI tools to optimize development, debugging, analysis, and documentation workflows—and support others in doing the same.

Our Stack & Tools

• Cloud & Infra: AWS, Kubernetes, Redis, Kafka, Terraform
• Observability: Grafana, Datadog, Opensearch, Prometheus, Sentry
• Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript
• CI/CD & Source Control: GitLab, ArgoCD

What Success Looks Like

• Observability is seen not as a platform function, but as an engineering-wide discipline.
• Zapier teams can confidently answer: Is my service healthy?
• SLOs are not only defined, but actively used to guide engineering decisions.
• Incidents are detected faster, recur less, and are learned from more effectively.
• Teams feel empowered and supported in owning the reliability of their systems.
• AI tooling is embedded across reliability workflows, increasing speed, quality, and experience.

How to Apply

Zapier uses a non-standard application process to promote inclusion and equity. We encourage you to apply even if your skills don\'t exactly match the job description. Answer a few in-depth questions in our application to help us get to know you quickly. Resume and CV fields are optional.

Education is not a requirement, but if you receive an offer you will need to include your most recent educational experience as part of the background check.

After you apply, you will receive updates even if there isn\'t an immediate fit. We strive to communicate status at least every seven days. If you have questions, contact your recruiter.

Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on identity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the company we strive to be, and we celebrate differences because they allow us to serve a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.

Zapier prioritizes the security of our customers\' information and adheres to data privacy laws. You can review our privacy policy here.

Zapier is committed to inclusion and welcomes applicants with disabilities. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the application or interview process, please contact [e-mail].

Application Deadline:

The anticipated application window is 30 days from the date the 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.