Principal Business Intelligence Engineer

Zillow

1d•$160,200 - $269,400•Remote

About The Position

At Zillow Group, we are constantly innovating ways to operate, monetize, and improve our nationwide real estate marketplace. The Data Science, Analytics and Engineering team supports several lines of business across the company by partnering closely with business leaders and engineering to model, analyze, and visualize business relevant metrics that inform both short- and long-term decision-making. Our structure is very flat and you will soon find yourself interacting directly across a wide variety of roles. As a Principal Business Intelligence Engineer, you will shape the practice itself, defining how BI and analytics engineering scales across the company and how our data infrastructure evolves to meet the demands of AI-powered analytics. You will build a deep understanding of our mission, business model, and customers to identify opportunities to simplify processes, improve alignment, and strengthen our metrics platform. You will design semantic layer architecture that enables consistent, trusted data across BI, data science, and AI tools, while leading cross-organizational initiatives and influencing tooling and infrastructure decisions. This role requires deep technical expertise, strategic vision, and strong influence across teams.

Requirements

8+ years of professional experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, visualization, or a related technical data role
Experience shipping customer facing, production grade reporting on time and accurately every day.
Expert-level SQL and data modeling skills with experience designing data architectures that span multiple business domains
Excellent communication and partner management skills, with a consistent ability to gain alignment and influence across product development, engineering, analytics, finance, sales and operations.
Deep experience with semantic layer design, metrics-as-code patterns, and data governance at organizational scale
Strong understanding of how AI systems, conversational analytics tools, and machine learning workflows consume structured data
Experience evaluating and adopting analytics engineering tooling at the organizational level (dbt, Databricks, Snowflake, or similar)

Nice To Haves

Here at Zillow - we value the experience and perspective of candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. We encourage you to apply if you have transferable skills or related experiences.

Responsibilities

Dive deep into Zillow's internal and third party data to model data that accurately reflect our customer journey and business processes.
Design a reusable, modular semantic layer that makes metrics and dimensions consumable across BI tools, data science workflows, and AI systems, while promoting consistency across those surfaces.
Lead cross-organizational data initiatives that align with company strategy and roadmap planning
Drive alignment on metric definitions and data governance standards across business lines
Influence build-versus-buy decisions for analytics tooling, semantic layer platforms, and data governance systems
Mentor senior analytics engineers as well as shape strategic direction and technical standards for analytics engineering across the organization
Partner with executive stakeholders to influence how the data infrastructure must evolve to support company objectives
Operate high availability data and reporting within SLA through quality alerting, detecting issues before customers and resolving with a sense of urgency.