Sr. Engineering Manager (India Engineering Leader)

AI AT ZAPIER

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Zapier is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Enterprise Integrations organization in India and serve as our India Eng Leader. In this role, you'll manage two engineering teams that build and maintain the most critical integrations in the Zapier product, while also representing and growing Zapier's engineering presence in India.

This team's mission includes:

• Building and maintaining some of the most important integrations in the Zapier product

• Collaborating with Customer Success, Support, and Sales to understand and invest in the integrations securing our most valuable enterprise deals

• Ensuring continued customer satisfaction by quickly resolving issues with these integrations

• Embedding AI into both the product experience and the team's own engineering workflows to dramatically accelerate delivery

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you'll lead through other leaders and senior ICs — spending the majority of your time on people leadership, cross-team strategy, org health, and site leadership, while remaining technically credible enough to shape architecture, review designs, and jump into the code when the moment calls for it. You'll own the technical strategy that positions Zapier as the most trusted provider of integrations in the market and set the bar for how AI-native engineering looks at Zapier.

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ABOUT YOU

You are a seasoned engineering leader. You have 7+ years of engineering experience with at least 4+ years managing engineers, and meaningful experience as a manager-of-managers or leading multiple teams simultaneously. You've hired, developed, and retained senior and staff-level engineers, and you know how to scale a team without losing velocity or culture.

You're a people leader first. You coach senior engineers on scope, influence, and technical leadership — not just on code. You run a rigorous performance management cycle: clear expectations, honest feedback, career ladders people can actually navigate, and the hard conversations when someone isn't a fit. You've grown ICs into tech leads and ICs into managers.

You own team performance end-to-end. You measure what matters — delivery predictability, quality, incident load, customer impact, engineer engagement — and you act on it. You know the difference between a process problem, a people problem, and a strategy problem, and you address each at the right altitude.

You're a founding leader. You understand that being the most senior engineering leader on the ground in India means more than managing your own teams. You build culture, represent Zapier in the local market, partner with Recruiting on hiring strategy, ensure new hires ramp well, and act as the connective tissue between India-based engineers and the rest of the globally distributed org.

You're an AI-native leader. You actively use AI tools (coding assistants, agents, LLM-powered internal tooling) to improve your own productivity and you push your teams to do the same. You can point to concrete examples where you've used AI to reduce cycle time, automate toil, improve code quality, or accelerate onboarding. You have opinions about where AI genuinely helps engineering teams and where it doesn't, and you evolve those opinions with the evidence.

You're a hands-on technical leader. You enjoy spending a portion of your time in the code, in design reviews, and in architectural discussions. You've led project planning and execution, shaped architectural decisions, and shipped products end-to-end. You're comfortable with developer experience design, authentication systems, and distributed systems architecture, and you understand AI/ML systems in production — including shipping products built on LLMs.

You're a collaborator and an advocate. You partner closely with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders to align on a shared vision. You actively seek input, integrate feedback, and communicate transparently — building the trust that lets teams navigate change and tough trade-offs.

You have deep customer empathy. Zapier's integrations are the heart of the product. You work with your teams to improve the customer experience and participate in programs that sharpen our product offerings.

You have excellent communication skills. You balance engineering concerns (technical debt, reliability, developer experience) with product and business concerns, and when the right answer isn't obvious, you build shared understanding around the decision.

THINGS YOU'LL DO

LEAD AND GROW TWO ENGINEERING TEAMS

• Manage two teams (roughly 8–10 engineers combined, including senior and staff-level ICs), either directly or through tech leads and a future EM hire

• Run weekly 1:1s, team meetings, and skip-levels; build rapport and trust with every engineer

• Coach senior engineers on technical leadership, scope, and influence; grow the next generation of tech leads and managers on your teams

• Own performance management end-to-end: expectations, feedback, reviews, promotions, and when necessary, performance improvement plans

OWN TEAM HEALTH AND DELIVERY PERFORMANCE

• Define and track what "good" looks like for your teams — delivery predictability, quality, incident response, customer satisfaction, engineer engagement — and make the data visible

• Identify and remove systemic blockers before they become delivery problems

• Keep leadership and peer teams informed through 1:1s, async update posts, and regular hangouts

DRIVE AI-POWERED PRODUCTIVITY

• Champion AI-assisted development across your teams: coding assistants, agentic workflows, LLM-powered internal tools, and AI-augmented code review

• Identify the highest-leverage places to apply AI to your team's engineering process — code generation, testing, documentation, on-call, customer issue triage, integration maintenance — and ship measurable improvements

• Set the bar for what an AI-native engineering team looks like at Zapier, and share those learnings with peer teams

• Stay current on AI/ML trends and help shape how Zapier's integrations leverage LLMs in the product itself

ACT AS ENGINEERING LEAD FOR INDIA

• Be the most senior engineering presence on the ground, representing Zapier's engineering org locally

• Partner with Recruiting on India hiring strategy, pipeline health, and interview quality

• Ensure new hires in India ramp quickly and feel connected to the broader globally distributed team

• Foster a strong local engineering culture — community, learning, and cross-team collaboration across India-based Zapiens

• Act as an escalation point for site-level operational and people matters

SHAPE TECHNICAL AND PRODUCT STRATEGY

• Partner with your Product and Design peers to deliver customer and company value

• Shape architectural decisions for the most critical integrations in the product

• Participate in code reviews and design reviews, spreading technical knowledge and moving it to documentation where appropriate

• Use customer feedback to guide your teams through trade-offs; know when to be rigid on quality and when t