Engineering Manager, Site Reliability

Job Description

Engineering Manager, Site Reliability (Embeds)

Hi there!

Zapier’s on a mission to make everyone more productive at work. Zapier has helped millions of people build businesses through the power of automation.

As we continue to scale our product and grow our team, we’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to manage a remotely distributed team of embedded Site Reliability Engineers.

Our embedded Site Reliability Engineers work directly with developers to help architect, automate, and maintain services. Developers bear responsibility for running services and our embedded SREs make sure they have all the tools and knowledge they need.

You’ll work across multiple groups so your team can provide the right assistance to developers. You’ll coordinate multiple projects and work directly with senior leaders to establish project priorities. You’ll cultivate the team's talents as they improve application reliability by using a software engineering approach to operations. You'll get to impact every engineering team in the organization and use a broad set of technologies. Maintaining excellent relationships and communicating effectively with teams will be crucial to success.

When bad things happen, you'll have the support of your team to solve contributing causes, learn from failures, and build a robust and resilient system for our customers. We look for the solution that automates the problem away, not the one that requires manual effort.

Things We've Done Recently:

• Built dozens of new microservices in Kubernetes across multiple AWS accounts
• Contributed to open-source Kubernetes projects to support autoscaling our stack
• Continually grown to handle millions of daily requests
• Handled major migrations between hosting providers, database systems, and stateful technologies
• Created rapid deployment pipelines in GitLab and ArgoCD to support continuous delivery
• Built tools to bootstrap new Kubernetes services at the click of a button

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

About You

• You are an effective team builder. This isn't your first leadership role and you've been in a direct leadership role for at least two years. You know how to hire, train, and develop Site Reliability Engineers from all backgrounds. You understand the benefits of building a diverse and inclusive SRE team. You value teamwork and believe in helping others feel safe to grow and develop. You help engineers get better at what they do, and you don’t need to be in the same room to help them succeed.
• You have a background in Site Reliability Engineering. You’re comfortable talking about SLOs, incident management, and building a culture of reliability. You have empathy for our customers and our engineers who use our systems and are eager to make improvements for them. You seek to reduce toil and understand what it means to take a software engineering approach to operations.
• You can keep track of, prioritize, and manage multiple projects. We're a growing team, and there's no shortage of things you could be doing in a day. You'll carve out time for functional projects and ensure the engineers on your team solve issues that matter -- making development even easier, building a culture of reliability, and delivering outstanding service to our customers.
• You have excellent communication skills. You regularly work with engineers and other stakeholders, balancing engineering concerns (such as technical debt) with product concerns. Not only do you know how to share your knowledge with the team and document things well so they can be consumed asynchronously (we do this a lot as a remote company), but you know how to communicate effectively with software and support teams.
• You’re a strong leader. You lead by example and empathy, understand the business and how to prioritize project work, emphasize mentorship, and create an environment of learning. You understand that experimentation is essential and know how to support your team through that process. You encourage diversity of thought and know that the team is collectively stronger than any individual.
• You know the cloud. You’ve designed and maintained highly available, cloud-based infrastructures in AWS or another cloud offering. You understand how to leverage infrastructure as code tools and have experience implementing best practices for reliability and observability. We use Terraform, Kubernetes, Redis, GitLab, and Datadog.
• You can code. You have experience with a language like Python or Go to create automated tools. You believe in hands-off deployments and infrastructure as code. Well-honed expertise with the fundamentals of software development goes a long way here.
• You value our values. At Zapier, our values are at the heart of how we work together and think about our customers. In our remote setting, they help develop trust and ensure we work and collaborate to democratize automation. You see how these values can empower meaningful work, thrive in a collaborative setting, and are eager to continue growing excited to be part of the team.

Things You'll Do:

Zapier is a fast-growing company, so you'll likely get experience on many different projects across the organization. Here are some things you'll probably do:

• Work closely with engineering peers to provide high-quality, reliable, and performant production software.
• Advance Site Reliability Engineering as a practice across Engineering.
• Drive process for incident management and on-call response.
• Work within an Agile framework to provide the common infrastructure and developer infrastructure that enables Zapier engineering.
• Execute and deliver on the strategic vision of Production Engineering by identifying and delivering relevant backlog items.
• Develop effective ways to communicate, monitor, and lead your team through weekly one-on-ones and team meetings.
• Keep the leadership team informed on your team’s progress in ways that are easy and enjoyable to receive, like one-on-one's, update posts, and regular team hangouts.
• Build rapport with each member of your Engineering Team (and beyond!) Support them through coaching and mentorship to help level up their skills.
• Participate in code reviews, learning and spreading technical knowledge throughout Zapier -- moving knowledge to documentation where appropriate.
• Occasionally dive into the code; fixing bugs, improving developer experience, smoothing edges -- sometimes even spiking out small proofs of concept.
• Actively recruit, onboard, and train new engineers at Zapier. This might involve tweaking the skills portions of interviews, or writing better documentation.

The Whole Package

We're currently hiring for the following locations:

• UTC-6 and UTC+1 time zones.

Our fully remote, distributed environment enables us to work with awesome people from around the world. Our team members work from 38 different countries. We generally hire based on timezones and try to keep teams together by making sure that every Zapien overlaps with their manager & teammates for at least a few hours a day.

Zapier offers:

• Competitive salary and bonus program
• Equity for All: Stock options (or equivalent) for every Zapien
• Healthcare + dental + vision coverage*
• Fertility and Adoption Assistance
• Retirement plan with 4% company match*
• $2,000 annual learning stipend for use on courses, conferences, and more—your choice
• Annual all-company retreat
• 14 weeks paid leave for new parents of biological or adopted children
• Customized Zapiversary rewards on your 1, 3, 5, 7 and 10 year work anniversaries
• Leading-edge equipment. We set you up with an Apple laptop and provide an additional budget for you to choose other home office accessories and software you may need.
• Time to renew. We encourage Zapiens to take at least 2 weeks off each year. Most of us take 4-5 weeks, in addition to locally recognized holidays.
• Opportunity to work with Zapier’s amazing partners network

*While we support Zapiens around the world the best we can, healthcare plans are available in the UK, Canada, and United States. Retirement plans are currently available specifically in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and United States. A regional benefits premium is added directly to the salary ranges for team members who are in countries where we do not have entities or provide company-sponsored benefits. When recommendations are made for base salary, the benefits premium has already been factored in.

How to Apply

At Zapier, we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us better, which is why we have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. We are looking for the best fit for each of our roles, regardless of the type of education or companies in your background, so we encourage you to apply even if your skills and experiences don’t exactly match the job description. All we ask is that you answer a few in-depth questions in our application that would typically be asked at the start of an interview process. This helps speed things up by letting us get to know you and your skillset a bit better right out of the gate. Please be sure to answer each question; the resume and CV fields are optional.

After you apply, you are going to hear back from us—even if we don’t see an immediate fit with our team. In fact, throughout the process, we strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application. We know we’ll make mistakes from time to time, so if you ever have questions about where you stand or about the process, just ask your recruiter!

Zapier is an equal opportunity employer and we're excited to work with talented and empathetic people of all identities. Zapier does not discriminate based on someone's identity in any aspect of hiring or employment as required by law and in line with our commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity. protected by local law. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be, and we celebrate our differences because those differences are what allow us to make a product that serves a global user base.

Zapier is committed to inclusion. As part of this commitment, Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact [email protected].

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