Staff Engineer, Backend - Revenue

Zapier Zapier · Enterprise · NAMER · Engineering

Staff Engineer, Backend - Revenue at Zapier. This role focuses on the technical vision and long-term architecture for the Revenue Zone, which handles billing, subscriptions, payments, pricing, entitlements, and checkout. The engineer will design pricing primitives, service boundaries, and data models to enable faster shipping of pricing and packaging changes. The role requires strong domain knowledge in billing systems, subscription management, payment processing, or financial platforms, and expertise in API design, platform development, and performance optimization. The engineer will also serve as a technical leader, shaping the long-term platform vision and translating business strategy into technical direction. While AI coding tools are used in the workflow, the core function is not AI/ML development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Serve as a technical leader within the Revenue Zone: You’ll operate as part of the zone’s leadership team, partnering closely with Engineering, Product, and Design to shape strategy and roadmap decisions. You’ll translate business context into technical direction—and ensure engineering tradeoffs are clearly understood at the business level.
  2. Shape the long-term platform vision: You’ll define and evolve the architectural direction of the Revenue Zone, balancing near-term delivery with

Skills

Required

  • Proven engineering impact in complex, production systems at scale
  • Experience shipping projects with measurable improvements in shifting requirement environments
  • Ability to separate essential from accidental complexity and make tradeoffs explicit
  • Strong domain knowledge in billing systems, subscription management, payment processing, or financial platforms
  • Understanding of metered billing, pricing models, entitlements, revenue recognition
  • Experience designing and building APIs for multiple consumers
  • Track record of identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks
  • Outcome-driven and customer-focused approach
  • Experience leading technical initiatives spanning multiple teams
  • End-to-end ownership
  • Ability to gather requirements, surface risks, align stakeholders, and drive ambiguous problems
  • Experience as a trusted partner to Engineering, Product, and Design leadership
  • Comfort navigating large, mature codebases and monoliths

Nice to have

  • AI fluency and point of view on AI tool usage

What the JD emphasized

  • production-critical, finance-grade infrastructure where correctness is non-negotiable
  • billing/payments/monetization domain experience
  • billing systems, subscription management, payment processing, or financial platforms
  • metered billing, pricing models, entitlements, revenue recognition
  • API, platform, and performance expertise
  • designed and built APIs that serve multiple consumers
  • identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks
  • Cross-team leadership and proactive ownership
  • led technical initiatives that span multiple teams
  • operate with end-to-end ownership
  • gather requirements, surface risks early, align stakeholders, and drive ambiguous problems through to measurable outcomes
  • trusted partner to Engineering, Product, and Design leadership
  • Comfort with complexity
  • large, mature codebases
  • navigate a monolith