Working at at Zapier

We’ve been remote since we were founded in 2011.

It’s safe to say we’re pioneers when it comes to building both a successful business and vibrant culture with a fully distributed team. Since day one, co-founders Wade, Bryan, and Mike worked remotely. They recognized the need to help people be more efficient at work and founded Zapier with the mission of automating tasks between apps – no code needed. Despite living in the same city at the time, they had different schedules and were bootstrapping Zapier on the side. Being able to get work done whenever, from wherever, was key. Today, we’re spread across 17 time zones in 40+ countries and are continuing to grow quickly!

We believe you can do your best work from any location and trust you to manage your schedule and workload. Folks who thrive at Zapier have a bias for action, are able to prioritize effectively (focusing on the most impactful tasks), and are thoughtful communicators. We record important meetings and are happy to work around each other’s schedules to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. You can learn more about our top tips for remote work (and how our app is making it easier for thousands of people!) here.

We promote a healthy work/life balance during the workday, too.

To us, work/life balance isn’t just about making time for your friends, family, and passions outside of work (although of course, that’s important). We also encourage people to take breaks during the day to connect with others in the company. This could be a monthly team lunch (since we're a remote company, we’ll expense your meal and often play an online game together) or a fun social to learn from others.

We also have remote team weekly events to bring the entire company together. They’re optional, and we record them for people who’d like to enjoy them on their own time. What’s more, we have over five hundred pages of #fun- Slack channels, such as #fun-cooking, #fun-fitness, #funDND, and #fun-adulting, just to name a few.

That said, if you’re not taking enough vacation, your manager will give you a friendly reminder to do so. While we have flexible time off, we recommend Zapiens take at least 2 weeks, and most of us take 4-5 weeks per year in addition to local holidays.

We take pride in having a safe, trusting environment.

The Zapier team is highly collaborative. Engineers work closely with product and design to come up with a product plan, then work together as an eng team to spec it out and build prototypes. We encourage people to speak up and share their ideas, and recognize that we’ll all make mistakes along the way. Any time something goes wrong, we all jump in to help solve the problem and never place the blame on any one individual. In fact, one of our senior engineers, Grant, openly shared his experience: “A change I made brought down Zapier for about 30 minutes. 🤦‍♂️ Someone opened up an incident and I jumped right on it to get a temporary fix in place. At no point did anyone blame me for what happened. We all stayed focused on arriving at a solution. Everyone brought empathy and patience to the incident, which only helped us get to a resolution more quickly and reflect [blamelessly] during the post-mortem. It made me really happy to work at Zapier.”

EQ is so important to us that we actively screen for it during the interview process.

Collaboration is a pillar of our culture and you’ll often find folks pair programming. The only way this can be successful is if we’re empathetic and emotionally intelligent. That’s why we look for people who are curious and eager to both share their knowledge and ask for help when needed. In order to reduce bias, we ask a set of predefined questions during our interviews. We’re not as concerned about how technically strong you are – we care more about seeing how you’ll work as part of a team and how you give and respond to feedback. Even during the technical interview, we’re not looking to see if you gave us the most robust technical explanation for your code, but rather can you explain it to another person in a way that makes sense? So much of EQ can shine through based on how people write documentation. It’s not just about finding the shortest way to make a line of JavaScript, we value writing code in a way that’s readable and easily explainable.

You’ll always have someone to learn from here.

A deep sense of curiosity and love of learning bonds us at Zapier. We support mentorship both externally (with a stipend for career coaching) and internally through our PIE (pathway to engineering) path program. Anyone outside of engineering can apply and we take two people every six months. During the first two months, team members continue to do their full-time job (such as customer support) while learning about the engineering org. The next four months are spent with different engineering teams (rotating every month) to learn different parts of the product. Afterward, the person joins engineering full-time. As Stacie, one of our engineering team leads, says, “Our support team members are some of the most brilliant people in the company. They have such a wide lens on our product because they’re helping customers use it every day. It’s fantastic to have them join our engineering team.”

If you’re curious about a certain topic, we have stipends that can be used for books, music, conferences, and courses. Our ERG groups, including Prizm (LGBTQIA+), BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) of Zapier, and Women of Zapier, have funding to learn, grow, and advocate together. We genuinely love getting together to talk and learn, which is why several learning groups – like data book club – form organically.

There’s no one right way to grow your career at Zapier. If you’re interested in people management, we’ll help guide you and give you a trial opportunity (it’s okay if it turns out it’s not for you!). If you prefer to remain an IC, we wholeheartedly support that, too, and can help you uplevel to the principal equivalent. At the end of the day, we want to help you grow both personally and professionally.

“Default to Transparency” is one of our core values.

Working in a globally distributed team means open communication is a must. Sharing context, goals, objectives, and in-progress work helps us stay on the same page and achieve our common goal: building the best products and experiences for our users. We rely on several work tools to collaborate and are very active in Slack, where we default to open channels. If you have a question, it’s likely someone else has the same one. Having everything out in the open gives others the opportunity to chime in, collaborate, and yields an answer even faster. It also helps cement an environment where everyone feels safe to make mistakes or ask silly questions.

In addition to our rich documentation culture, feedback is ingrained in everything we do. For example, we all have personal ReadMe docs that share how we like to receive feedback (e.g., openly in Slack, privately, in-the-moment, or later after they’ve had time to digest).

When it comes to meetings, we follow a scrum ritual (daily standups, sprint review, retros, and backlog grooming). Daily standups at 8am PST tend to be a great way to pass the baton; our West Coast team members are starting their day, while folks in Europe are wrapping up. However, these meetings (and most at Zapier) are always optional. Of course, we try to attend every meeting we can, but we understand that people have different responsibilities. If someone can’t attend, we make sure to share all of the relevant information so they can provide their input.

Having diverse experiences makes us a stronger team.

One of our senior frontend engineers, Lauren, was an opera singer and voice teacher before going to bootcamp and pivoting to tech. Stacie, our marketing platforms team lead, worked in social media and has a communications degree. Joy, one of our business operations associates, majored in ancient history (and business) in college. In fact, an informal poll of the engineering org showed we’re roughly 50-50 when it comes to having a CS degree. We are also ecstatic to announce that our very own Maggie Roque, Director of Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity, has been recognized by Untapped as a ‘Walk the Walk’ Award winner, alongside the top DEIB leaders of 2022.

In other great news, we are honored to share that in 2022 we ranked #9 in the top 100 Most Loved Workplaces through Newsweek! This award is a result of feedback from our employees via surveys and platforms like Glassdoor and Comparably.

We're so proud of our teammates who make Zapier such an incredible place to work. Everyone is always willing to dig in and learn something new, whether it’s a backend engineer dabbling in the frontend or vice versa. As we grow, we’re looking for people who share that mentality and bring diverse skills, experiences, and viewpoints.

Roughly one third of our employees are parents or caregivers.

Zapier is a great place to work if you have kids, are thinking about growing your family, or are a caregiver. You’ll often see colleagues’ kids pop up on Zoom during meetings. We understand that parents need more flexibility, especially given the challenges during the pandemic with school closures and lack of childcare. At many companies, if you miss a meeting important decisions are often made without you. That’s not the case here. Managers make sure to work with team members to ensure they’re able to attend important meetings, and if not, they’ll hold off on making a decision until all of the stakeholders can weigh in.

We never want you to feel guilty about taking the day off to care for a sick child or carving time out of your day to do school pick-ups or attend a music recital. Our offsites are also family-friendly. Last but not least, we know that complex, full-day take-homes can deter parents from applying, which is why we revised our take-home assignment to be shorter and less technical.

Whether you’re a parent of a newborn (we offer 14 weeks of paid leave), college student, a pet parent, a plant parent, or none of the above, don’t hesitate to check out our open roles!