Staff Backend Engineer, Commerce

AI at Zapier

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Job Posted: April 29, 2026

Updated: June 19, 2026

Location: Americas - North, Central and South America, EMEA, APAC

Hi there!

Zapier's mission is to make automation work for everyone. That mission is funded by revenue — and every dollar of it flows through our Commerce Zone. We build and operate the infrastructure behind billing, subscriptions, payments, pricing, entitlements, and checkout across everything Zapier ships: self-serve plans, enterprise contracts, and ecosystem offerings. When a customer upgrades, renews, changes plans, or pays an invoice, our systems make it happen — correctly, instantly, and at scale.

We're hiring a Staff Engineer to own the technical vision and long-term architecture for the Commerce Zone. You'll define the pricing primitives, service boundaries, and data models that let Zapier ship pricing and packaging changes in days instead of months — while keeping every dollar accounted for accurately. That means designing the framework and abstractions product teams plug into so they can launch new SKUs without becoming billing experts, building configuration-driven infrastructure for pricing experimentation, and ensuring the platform evolves without foundational rewrites.

This is production-critical, finance-grade infrastructure where correctness is non-negotiable. You'll drive alignment across teams in a space defined by high ambiguity and competing constraints, working closely with Product, Engineering, Finance, and Sales. The role is particularly exciting because decisions here ripple across Zapier — shaping how the company monetizes its next phase of growth.

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About You

Proven engineering impact: You've driven outcomes in complex, production systems at scale — shipping projects that delivered measurable improvements in environments where requirements shifted under you. You separate essential from accidental complexity, make tradeoffs explicit, and use data to inform decisions without becoming paralyzed by it. Many strong candidates have 8+ years of experience, but we hire for impact and capability, not tenure.

Billing/payments/monetization domain experience: You bring strong domain knowledge in billing systems, subscription management, payment processing, or financial platforms. You understand metered billing, pricing models, entitlements, revenue recognition, and the operational complexity of supporting enterprise customers. You know that billing isn't just a backend problem — it touches sales, finance, support, and product, and you've navigated that reality.

API, platform, and performance expertise: You've designed and built APIs that serve multiple consumers — internal teams, external partners, and user-facing products — and you know how to evolve systems without breaking existing integrations. You have a track record of identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks through profiling, caching, database optimization, and delivering measurable improvements that impact user experience and conversion.

Outcome-driven and customer-focused: You care deeply about the problems our customers are trying to solve and define success by the results they achieve — not the elegance of the technical solution. You fall in love with the problem, not your first implementation, and are willing to rethink or pivot when it better serves the customer and the business.

Cross-team leadership and proactive ownership: You've led technical initiatives that span multiple teams and operate with end-to-end ownership. You gather requirements, surface risks early, align stakeholders, and drive ambiguous problems through to measurable outcomes. You're a trusted partner to Engineering, Product, and Design leadership — helping shape roadmaps, translating business strategy into technical direction, and amplifying other engineers by raising standards and building durable foundations that create leverage across teams.

AI fluency: You use AI coding tools as a regular part of your workflow and have a point of view on where they accelerate delivery and where human judgment is non-negotiable. In a high-correctness domain like payments and billing, you know the difference between automating boilerplate and trusting AI with revenue logic — and you bring that judgment to the engineers you work with.

Comfort with complexity: You're at home in large, mature codebases — you know how to navigate a monolith, find the right leverage points, and make meaningful progress without waiting for a clean slate.

Things You’ll Do