Open positions

To apply for an open position, please send your resume and a brief cover letter (which can be in the body of your email) to the email provided in the description for the opening. Your cover letter should explain what makes you excited about working at Zulip in the role you're applying for. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

If you are an experienced engineer, and you believe that your background would be a great fit for Zulip, please email us at jobs+engineer@zulip.com with your resume and cover letter even if you don't see an open role that looks like the right fit.

All openings are remote.

Leadership team roles

Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed for seamless remote and hybrid work. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Zulip’s 100% open-source software is available as a cloud service or a self-hosted solution, and is used by thousands of organizations around the world. Zulip is a values-focused organization stewarded by the nonprofit Zulip Foundation.

We are looking for experienced leaders familiar with Zulip with strengths in the following areas. A single candidate is not expected to cover all these areas.

Technical: Technical leadership for a complex product (with web, desktop, and mobile apps) designed for reliability and maintainability.
Business: Business strategy and operations (finance, legal, payroll, etc.).
Management: Thoughtfully managing a remote team.
Marketing: B2B marketing strategy and execution.
Sales: Inbound sales and partnership negotiations.
Product: Managing a complex product that’s part of users’ daily workflows.

We anticipate posting full job descriptions and starting to interview candidates in June or July of 2026.

Email us at jobs+leader@zulip.com with your resume and cover letter if you're interested, and we’ll be in touch. Or learn more about how we work.

Senior Backend/Infrastructure Engineer

We're hiring a senior backend engineer to help build, operate, and scale Zulip — both as we run it on Zulip Cloud, and as thousands of self-hosters run it themselves. That means designing backend systems that perform well at Cloud scale while staying straightforward to install, upgrade, and maintain for a small team or a single admin. You'll work across backend features, performance, and infrastructure; review code from both staff and open-source contributors; and share responsibility for keeping Zulip Cloud production healthy. You'll help set technical direction on the team and mentor junior engineers and community contributors.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with an operations component. Expect a mix of feature and infrastructure work, code review, Zulip Cloud operations, and occasional technical support — fielding questions from our sales team and debugging production issues reported by Cloud customers and self-hosters.

What you'll do

Design and implement backend features and performance improvements in our Python/Django codebase, with an eye toward both Cloud scale and self-hosted simplicity.
Operate Zulip Cloud: monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, and on-call rotation.
Improve the install, upgrade, and operational experience for self-hosters.
Plan and execute PostgreSQL schema migrations that run reliably on both our Cloud database and self-hosted instances.
Review code from teammates and from open-source contributors, and mentor both — including participants in our internship programs who may be early in their careers.
Invest in the long-term maintainability of the codebase: clear commit history, tests, comments, and documentation, alongside the code itself.
Collaborate with the rest of the security team to investigate and remediate security issues, and communicate about them responsibly.
Help shape technical direction for the backend and infrastructure, primarily through written, asynchronous discussion in our public development community and on GitHub.
Support customer-reported production issues from both Cloud customers and self-hosters, and answer technical questions from sales when needed.

What we're looking for

Several years of experience operating medium-sized multi-system cloud deployments in production, with comfort in AWS.
Strong backend systems architecture skills and the judgment to make sound tradeoffs under real-world constraints.
Ability to design systems that work well across a wide range of deployment sizes — from Zulip Cloud at scale to a self-hosted instance run by a single admin on one VPS.
Hands-on PostgreSQL experience: tuning, indexing, and schema migrations on large tables.
A security mindset, with experience finding, remediating, and communicating about vulnerabilities, and handling incidents end-to-end.
Performance analysis skills — comfort profiling, measuring, and reasoning about bottlenecks across the stack.
Solid Linux/Unix fluency and working knowledge of Docker.
Experience with observability tooling (metrics, logs, traces); comfort with Prometheus and PromQL.
Excellent code review and code hygiene; clear written communication.
Strong debugging and systems-thinking instincts.
Comfort with ambiguity, self-directed prioritization, and written, asynchronous collaboration.
Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation.

Nice to have

Python experience (not strictly required, but you'll come up to speed faster).
Prior open-source contribution.
Experience with Puppet or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
Experience with RabbitMQ, Redis, or similar.
Familiarity with Zulip as a user or contributor.
Prior experience working fully remotely.

Email us at jobs+infra@zulip.com with your resume and cover letter to apply, or learn more about how we work.

Senior Product Designer (full-time or part-time)

We are looking for an experienced product designer with a strong background in visual design to make our web application, mobile application, and marketing pages shine.

You will work closely with Zulip's leadership team.

What you’ll do:

Improve and maintain a web app design system in Figma. You'll be developing design patterns, guidelines, and reusable components to help create a consistent and maintainable application.
Break down design changes into manageable pieces that can be incrementally integrated into an actively evolving product.
Actively participate in design discussions. Review design implementations and tune designs in response to feedback.
Help design new product features, working in a dynamic collaboration with product, engineering, and users.
Design new marketing pages and redesign old ones. Strengthen our brand's look and feel to make it instantly recognizable across apps, landing pages, social accounts, and ads.
Create and prepare icons for web and mobile apps.

Essential qualifications:

Your portfolio showcases a track record of designing high-quality web applications. You've had a leading role in designing a complex application.
You have a strong understanding of mobile and web UI guidelines, standards, approaches, and patterns. Working within those structures, you can think creatively to develop elegant solutions to complex problems.
You communicate with clarity and precision, and are comfortable in a distributed work environment. You thrive in an inclusive culture where ideas are debated openly and everyone is treated with respect.
Expert knowledge of Figma.

Extra credit for any of the following:

Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Your portfolio includes mobile applications (iOS or Android).
You've worked on a chat app in the past.
You are deeply familiar with a team chat app as an advanced user or administrator. Better yet, you are an experienced user of Zulip.
You've created an icon set.

Email us at jobs+designer@zulip.com with your resume and cover letter to apply, or learn more about how we work.

How we work

Open source. The Zulip software is 100% free and open source. We're an open-source project first, and we’re building an independent sustainable business as a means to support the project's growth and long-term future. We provide the same open-source code to our largest customers as to anyone with git clone.

Open project. The Zulip project is one where people really do show up through the Internet and start making real changes. That doesn’t happen by accident; it takes work and thoughtfulness. Most of us work remotely, and we discuss our code and our plans in public, in writing, primarily asynchronously, using Zulip and GitHub.

Inclusive community. The Zulip community is made up of a mixture of volunteers and professionals from all walks of life. Diversity is one of our strengths, and we strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities from anywhere in the world.

Globally distributed. Our company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, but like our community, our ~15 person team works from around the world. We communicate primarily async, in the Zulip development community and on GitHub. Our roles are open to all applicants without regard for location.

Maintainable software. Great software over time depends on a team’s shared understanding of a system and how to change it, as much as on the code itself. Beyond writing our code so it works today, we put equal effort into writing code, tests, comments, commit history, and documentation clearly, to share with each other and future contributors our understanding of how and why it works, so we can build on it tomorrow.

Work with us