Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend
About the team
Zillow is the top real estate website in the U.S., where millions of people come for help with their move. The hardest parts happen after the fun of browsing online, and the full process may span months. We empower home buyers by connecting them to the best professionals and tools to complete their move with confidence and ease.The Post-Connect Engineering org owns the stretch of the journey that starts when a home buyer requests to tour a home and ends when their offer is under contract. It's all too easy for a buyer to be overwhelmed by the details and daunted by finding "the one" that fits the must-haves and the budget. Our job is to make touring and triaging homes easy to do with other people, so that buyers remain energized and able to actually move. Our systems manage appointments against real-world constraints, sustain rich conversations across disparate channels and apps, and convert a buyer's raw reactions to homes into actionable plans, with AI running throughout.
About the role
You will primarily support five engineering teams and their partners in Product and Data Science on matters technical and strategic. You solve customer, business, and technical problems without authority over any team; your influence comes from the quality of your judgment and the relationships you cultivate. You will lead and mentor engineers across the organization and act as a domain expert and ambassador across Zillow Group.
You will be the primary technical steward of the backend of the Post-Connect domain; it spans multiple languages, third-party integrations, and a distributed architecture running in AWS. But we are first and foremost a product engineering team, with customers as our north star. You choose where your effort will have the most leverage. You will take on the problems that are too large or too ambiguous for a single team to absorb. The job requires self-direction with occasional top-down assignments: there is no backlog curated for you.
Success looks like framing a problem nobody has yet defined; asking tough questions to sharpen a plan; doing analysis that settles a build-versus-buy or an architecture decision; prototyping a new tool, pattern, or process yourself so the teams have a working exemplar to adopt; balancing your workload and delegating work that’s not essential for you to do. There’s plenty of ambiguity here, but also tremendous opportunity to improve how people buy and sell homes!
You will get to
Define and drive the long-term technical strategy and architecture for back-end platforms and services, ensuring they are scalable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient in a cloud-native environment.
Lead design and implementation of high-throughput, low-latency APIs, data and event pipelines, and platform capabilities that support multiple Zillow brands, products, and machine learning workloads.
Solve the most complex technical problems on the team, making high-impact design decisions, setting engineering standards, and de-risking ambiguous initiatives through prototyping, experimentation, and data-driven tradeoffs.
Partner closely with product, data, and machine learning leaders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps, aligning cross-team dependencies and ensuring back-end systems enable great customer and partner experiences.
Mentor and coach senior engineers and tech leads, elevating engineering practices in areas such as reliability, performance, testing, incident response, and operational excellence across multiple teams.
Influence platform and data governance, security, and compliance practices, helping define guidelines, reviews, and guardrails that keep systems resilient and protect customer and partner data at scale.
Champion a culture of continuous improvement by driving adoption of modern back-end technologies, tooling, and workflows that improve developer experience, reduce friction, and increase delivery speed and quality.
Who you are
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating back-end or distributed systems in production environments.
Experience leading large-scale, highly available, and high-volume services or platforms, ideally in a cloud environment such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
Experience providing technical leadership across teams or domains, including setting architectural direction, influencing roadmaps, and driving complex initiatives from concept to production.
Or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
Get to know us
At Zillow, we’re reimagining how people move-through the real estate market and through their careers. As the most-visited real estate platform in the U.S., we help people navigate buying, selling, financing and renting with greater ease and confidence. Whether you're working in tech, sales, operations, or design, you’ll be part of a company reshaping an industry and helping more people make home a reality.
How we work is a key part of that transformation. Through Cloud HQ, our strategic approach to distributed work, most employees have the flexibility to work from wherever they’re most productive-enabling us to move fast, stay connected and deliver on our people promise.
Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the U.S. Zillow was named one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® in 2026, and included on TIME’s America’s Best Companies 2026 list, reflecting our commitment to creating an innovative, inclusive, and engaging culture where employees are empowered to grow.
No matter where you sit in the organization, your work will help drive innovation, support our customers, and move the industry-and your career-forward, together.
Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact your recruiter directly.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable state and local law.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.