Director, Engineering (Enterprise)

About the role

The Director of Engineering will lead Zapier's Enterprise engineering organization into its next phase of growth. They will shape the definitive playbook for how Zapier governs AI acting on behalf of its customers, at the moment that work matters most.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the strategy and roadmap for Zapier's Enterprise Governance bet, in partnership with Product and Design leaders and connected explicitly to Zapier's company-wide agent strategy.
• Own the org’s technical point of view on identity, access, audit, and policy, and defend it in cross-functional and executive settings.
• Make the staffing and investment trade-off calls across initiatives that no single initiative or team can make for itself.
• Own the technical roadmap for the systems that let enterprises govern AI acting on their behalf: identity and permissions for agents, audit trails for actions, and policy controls that scale beyond human-only usage.
• Define what safe, accountable AI-native engineering practice looks like for your own teams - code review, on-call ownership, quality bars for agent-authored work.
• Identify and implement AI-powered tooling that accelerates your teams' own delivery velocity and quality.
• Be accountable for the reliability of Zapier's identity, audit, and admin infrastructure, including the Tier-1 services enterprise customers depend on most.
• Build bench strength and resilience across critical systems as the team and its scope continue to grow.
• Step in during major incidents, coordinating cross-functional resources and setting stakeholder expectations when severity demands senior leadership involvement.
• Partner directly with Sales, Customer Success, and enterprise customers to translate real deal and support needs into a defensible engineering roadmap.
• Take ownership by default on cross-org technical initiatives touching identity and governance - including new shared infrastructure being built with adjacent orgs - rather than waiting to be assigned.
• Own the output and outcomes of your teams and the systems they own.

Requirements

• You think in terms of governance, not just features.
• You understand that identity, access control, audit, and policy aren't compliance checkboxes - they're the trust infrastructure that determines whether enterprises can safely let AI act on their systems.
• You've built or led systems where getting this wrong has real consequences, and you bring that judgment to every product and architecture decision.
• You raise the bar on reliability as you scale.
• You've built strong service ownership models, clear on-call practices, and durable quality bars in fast-growing engineering organizations.
• You treat reliability and operational excellence as a competitive advantage rather than an afterthought, and you know how to instill that discipline in a team that's scaling quickly.
• You set technical direction - you don't just execute someone else's.
• You partner deeply with Product and Design as peers and shape strategy together, but you bring a strong, independent engineering point of view to that partnership.
• You're comfortable being the person who pushes back on a roadmap when the technical or operational reality demands it.
• You've scaled engineering organizations through structural change. You've led teams of managers and technical leads through real organizational transitions, not just steady-state growth - shifting operating models, redefining ownership, or integrating new ways of working.
• You know how to bring a team through ambiguity without losing their trust or their output.
• You are deeply customer- and stakeholder-oriented. You've worked directly with sales, customer success, and enterprise customers to understand what "enterprise-ready" actually means in practice, and you've made the tradeoffs between enterprise scale and delivery speed.
• You're a credible, responsive partner to go-to-market teams without letting reactive asks crowd out foundational work.
• You've driven engineering quality and velocity with data. You've established data-driven approaches to measuring delivery, reliability, and quality, and used them to make real investment tradeoffs rather than to produce a dashboard.
• You have a point of view on balancing reactive/KTLO work against proactive investment, with mechanisms to keep that balance honest.
• You are a skilled mentor, coach, and communicator. You have a track record of developing engineers and engineering leaders, and you communicate proactively and clearly, in writing by default, to align technical and non-technical stakeholders on vision, tradeoffs, and results.
• You lead AI-native engineering, not just AI-native products. You've used AI coding agents and orchestration tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar), and you have a concrete point of view on how they change what "good" engineering practice looks like - code review, on-call ownership, and quality bars all need rethinking when a meaningful share of code is agent-authored.
• You embed accountability into AI-assisted workflows rather than lowering the bar for velocity, and you expect the same discipline from your teams.
• You champion efficiency and leverage. At Zapier, your work has a disproportionate impact on the business. You default to AI-first thinking in your own work and your team's, and you build systems and practices that compound impact over time rather than relying on heroics.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering organizations through structural change.
• Strong experience building and managing large-scale, distributed systems.
• Proven ability to deliver high-quality, reliable, and scalable systems.
• Experience with identity, access control, audit, and policy in enterprise environments.
• Experience with AI and machine learning tools and platforms.
• Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams, including product, design, and sales.
• Experience with data-driven decision-making and metrics-driven engineering.
• Experience with mentoring and developing engineers and engineering leaders.

Skills

• Strong leadership skills.
• Experience with identity, access control, audit, and policy in enterprise environments.
• Experience with AI and machine learning tools and platforms.
• Experience with data-driven decision-making and metrics-driven engineering.
• Experience with mentoring and developing engineers and engineering leaders.

Benefits

At Zapier, we offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes:

• Competitive compensation and equity options.
• Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance coverage.
• Retirement savings plans with employer contributions.
• Employee assistance programs for mental health support.
• Professional development opportunities and training.
• Regular team-building activities and events.

Pay

We offer a competitive salary based on experience and qualifications.

Schedule

We are an all-remote company, and we operate on Pacific Time Zone (PT).

Contact

If you have any questions about the job or the application process, please contact us at [email protected].