Principal Full Stack Software Development Engineer

Zillow

1d•$181,800 - $305,700•Remote

About The Position

At Zillow our mission is to give people the power to unlock life’s next chapter. Zillow’s AI Org plays an important part in delivering unique AI-powered experiences for the hundreds of millions of customers that visit Zillow websites each month. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Transaction AI team, you’ll be partnering with a highly skilled group of applied scientists, software developers, and machine learning engineers working together toward a bold and audacious goal. The Transaction AI team at Zillow is focused on bringing agentic AI powered products and services to real estate agents, loan officers, and the buyers they are helping have a smoother and more delightful experience. We co-build end-to-end applications and AI-driven services that help agents and loan officers use their time more efficiently, giving them more insight into how to help each buyer they are interacting with. We also develop and own internal tooling such as Agentic Evaluation harnesses and tools that our partner teams across the company working to bring Agentic AI products to market move faster. Learn more about what we are doing at https://www.zillow.com/engineering and https://www.zillow.com/ai. We are seeking a collaborative, customer-focused, and product-minded engineer with deep experience with data infrastructure and backend development. The ideal candidate must be passionate about building tools and experiences that showcase the capabilities of machine learning and AI and helping the team leverage their engineering chops to solve customer problems. You will work closely with senior leaders and principal engineers across the AI organization to help guide our architecture and technical strategy around agentic AI and will be a critical technical voice to the Transaction AI leadership team.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building and shipping production-grade software or services
Strong understanding of software design patterns and principles
An understanding of the Machine Learning product development cycle and excitement to learn more about it
You are comfortable contributing across the stack, including ETL, backend services, and product front-end.
You are fluent in languages such as Python, Typescript, and Javascript.
Strong use of and familiarity with AI coding tools and effective patterns of deploying AI agents to multiply your impact.
Are excited and comfortable communicating highly technical ideas with leaders and principles across technical disciplines - not just with other engineers.
Experience setting architecture vision and strategy for an organization
Experience in developing highly available services at Internet scale
Ability to collaborate across teams and leaders, indirectly influence others in a positive way, and navigate difficult conversations and decisions
Have experience and passion for mentoring and guiding engineers, helping develop and grow technical leaders

Nice To Haves

Experience developing applications that rely on generative AI or large language models and related technologies (knowledge retrieval solutions, for example).
Experience collaborating with science, engineering, design, research and product partners in a team with a startup culture.

Responsibilities

Collaborate closely with applied scientists, engineering, design, and research to understand, scope, design, prototype, implement, and iterate on internal and external facing systems supporting and implementing next-generation AI applications.
Lead small working groups to build POCs and to prove out new agentic customer experiences and try out new infrastructure
Set the tone of software development culture in Transaction AI with an emphasis on finding new and effective ways to leverage AI tools to increase the quality and scale of the engineering outputs
Partner with Senior Product Leadership to align engineering capability to business strategy
Set the standard for high-quality work through code reviews, mentoring, and the development of guidelines
Provide leadership that helps navigate the team through complicated technical challenges
Educate the science leadership of Transaction AI about the back-end systems being built or that you are proposing we build or adopt and connect them back to our teams core strategy and the wider AI org agentic strategy
Support the growth and development of individuals and the team through interviewing, onboarding, and mentorship