Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend

Zillow is a real estate technology company that helps people navigate buying, selling, financing, and renting homes. The Principal Software Development Engineer will provide technical and strategic leadership across the Post-Connect domain, defining backend architecture and solving complex, ambiguous problems. The role will lead engineering initiatives, partner with product and data science teams, mentor engineers, and improve the scalability, reliability, security, and efficiency of distributed systems.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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