Zipline is the connector engine that quietly moves billions of rows for teams that can't afford to lose a message. Founded in 2024 by engineers who spent a decade running data pipelines at scale and got tired of waking up at 3am.
Before Zipline, our founding team ran the data platform at a fast-growing fintech. Every quarter brought a new connector to wire up, a new sink to debug, and a new postmortem about the row that got dropped between the WAL and the warehouse.
We tried Debezium + Kafka Connect. We tried Fivetran. We tried writing it ourselves. Nothing was both reliable enough for production finance data and fast enough for the analyst who wanted yesterday's numbers by 9am.
So we built Zipline - a connector engine designed by people who have been on call. Exactly-once by default. Sub-second latency without tuning. CLI-first, version-controlled, observable from day one.
We're still small. We hire deliberately. We turn down meetings. We ship the boring fix. And we believe the most interesting code is the code that quietly keeps running.
These are the tradeoffs we make when nobody's watching.
The interesting code is the code that keeps running. We optimize for the boring middle of the night, not the launch demo.
The SDK is Apache 2.0 and forever will be. The closed-source service plane funds the work. We're transparent about which is which.
Engineers do support rotations. The fastest way to design a good API is to watch someone fail to use the bad one.
Zipline runs in your infrastructure. Your data flows source to sink without passing through us. This is a product decision, not a feature.
If a benchmark or a postmortem is on the line, we link the dashboard. Vibes are not a substitute for P99 latency.
Decisions live in async docs. Meetings are for things async can't resolve. Your time is yours.
We're a fully remote team of senior engineers, designers, and one person who does customer success because he's better at it than anyone else. We work async across seven time zones.
If you build something hard and want to talk - even casually - we'd love to hear from you. We're not always hiring, but we always read the email.
See open rolesWhether you're considering Zipline, hiring us as a vendor, or just want to nerd out about CDC - we'd love to hear from you.
