Principal Design Technologist, AI Design Tools

Zillow

6d•$169,300 - $284,700•Remote

About The Position

We're hiring a Principal Design Technologist to own AI design tooling for builders across Zillow. You'll sit on the Design Foundations team and own how ZxD’s design language, systems, and standards integrate into AI tools. These AI tools will be used to create user-facing experiences, including early explorations, eng-ready prototypes, and production code. Zillow’s product, engineering, and design teams use AI daily to create experiences for web, iOS, and Android. Because no standard workflow exists, teams apply our design system, brand guidelines, and accessibility specs in their own way, leading to wasted effort and inconsistent results. This role owns the end-to-end design tooling ecosystem and sets the standard for how AI-augmented design happens at Zillow. Rather than relying on training presentations to drive adoption, this role focuses on shipping high-quality tools that provide clear value and integrating them into existing workflows on a paved path. Success requires identifying effective AI workflows, developing the necessary tools & infrastructure, and collaborating to scale them.

Requirements

8+ years of relevant experience across design, and front-end engineering, with meaningful depth across one or more areas.
Production experience shipping internal-facing tooling for designers or engineers that measurably changed how a team worked. Examples: a Figma plugin used at scale, an MCP server in production, a Skill or extension with documented adoption, a component library or token pipeline with real downstream consumers.
Strong fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) and the patterns that make them productive in real codebases: structured context, retrieval, agent skills, evals, tool integration.
Strong front-end engineering depth. Comfortable opening PRs in real repos, including the design system codebase.
Working knowledge of design systems: component libraries, tokens, primitives, accessibility, multi-brand or multi-surface theming.
Demonstrated ability to communicate technical work to senior design and product leaders, and to translate between disciplines. You can write a clear doc, run a credible technical review, and represent your work to a director-level audience.
Track record of cross-functional partnership: building durable working relationships with design, engineering, product, and co-owning roadmaps and decisions across those boundaries.
Stakeholder influence. You've moved senior leaders' decisions with data and a clear point of view, and you can show specific examples.

Nice To Haves

Experience running adoption and enablement efforts (training, guides, comms) as a complement to infrastructure.
Experience with eval frameworks, visual diffing, or AI output benchmarking against a defined quality bar.
Public work in this space: open source, conference talks, agent plugins or skill.

Responsibilities

Unify ZxD's AI design tooling into one supported set
Bring the scattered AI design tools builders are already using into a coherent, supported stack with clear rules of the road.
Decide which tools and workflows we invest in, which we partner around, and which we leave alone.
Identify where AI design tooling pays off most, from early explorations through production-ready prototypes, and prioritize where Zillow needs to own the tool versus pass through to a vendor.
Evolve the design system as AI context
Partner with the Constellation team to evolve the MCP server: expand coverage, sharpen retrieval, and add new tools as the space shifts.
Ship and maintain a Constellation Skill bundle for Claude Code, Cursor, and/or Figma so the design system is first-class context wherever builders are working.
Author starter templates for Zillow's highest-traffic surfaces so designers, PMs, and researchers can prototype production-credible UIs without starting from a blank prompt.
Build and maintain an evaluation harness that holds AI-generated UI to Constellation's bar (component usage, token conformance, accessibility, visual diff).
Treat Constellation's documentation as a product whose users include LLMs.
Work with the system team on machine-readable metadata and a trust-level model for what agents can change unsupervised.
Enable other disciplines to develop their own AI tooling
Partner with design, research, content, and brand teams to integrate their assets (UI patterns, research synthesis, content voice consistency, brand asset generation) into the unified tooling workflow.
Stand up lightweight evaluation patterns those teams can adopt.
Help partners become the builders of their own tooling, with shared infrastructure where it makes sense.
Run adoption and shape the broader strategy
Build the enablement layer that turns infrastructure into behavior change: office hours, paved-path docs, example workflows, a champions network, and a calendar of team events.
Track where designers hit walls and use those failures to prioritize what we build next.
Act as a technical voice for ZxD in the company-wide conversation on AI design tools.