Principal Product Designer, Mover Experience

Zillow

1d•$169,300 - $284,700•Remote

About The Position

Zillow’s Mover Experience is focused on building the best home buying experience out there. Whether you are browsing, buying, selling, renting, or just planning, we are there to help anyone get home. We work across the entire customer journey, from early inspiration and home search through decision-making, collaboration, financing, and transaction. Our teams are developing new consumer experiences at the intersection of product design, artificial intelligence, research, and engineering. We are deeply consumer- and design-minded. We care about making technically ambitious experiences feel intuitive, useful, polished, and distinctly Zillow. As AI changes what products can do and how people interact with them, we are exploring new experience paradigms rather than simply adding new technology to familiar interfaces. We are hiring a Principal Design Technologist to help define and prototype the future of Zillow’s consumer experience. This is a highly hands-on, exploratory role for someone who combines technical depth, product judgment, design sensibility, and a bias toward making. You will work alongside product designers, researchers, product leaders, engineers, data scientists, and AI platform teams to turn emerging technical capabilities into tangible consumer experiences. Your work will move across the end-to-end mover journey. You may explore how an agentic experience understands a customer over time, prototype a new interaction between conversation and visual interfaces, bring an emerging research capability into a consumer context, or help a team make an important product decision by showing rather than describing what could be possible. The gravitational center of the role is not a specific tool, platform, or technical specialty. It is curiosity, proactive ownership, and the ability to use technology and prototyping to advance product definition. You will create experiences that are real enough to learn from, refined enough to inspire confidence, and technically grounded enough to shape the path toward production.

Requirements

8+ years of relevant experience across design technology, creative technology, interaction design, product engineering, prototyping, or adjacent disciplines, with meaningful depth in more than one area.
A portfolio or body of work demonstrating technically ambitious, high-craft interactive experiences.
Strong experience creating functional prototypes that influenced product definition, customer learning, technical direction, or organizational decision-making.
Advanced front-end development skills using modern web technologies and frameworks.
Demonstrated strength in interaction design, motion, prototyping, and consumer-product craft.
Experience working with emerging technologies such as generative AI, conversational systems, agentic architectures, multimodal interfaces, machine learning, or dynamic user interfaces.
Ability to work effectively with product designers, researchers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, and senior leaders.
Experience independently leading ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from early exploration through a meaningful outcome.
Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to present technical and experiential work to senior audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience bringing AI- or machine-learning-powered capabilities into consumer products.
Familiarity with LLM orchestration, retrieval systems, tool use, memory, evaluation, generative UI, or agentic interaction patterns.
Experience partnering directly with applied research, machine learning, or data science teams.
Experience prototyping across web, native mobile, voice, spatial, or multimodal environments.
Experience with creative coding, animation systems, game engines, real-time graphics, 3D, or emerging interface technologies.
Experience contributing to production codebases or helping product teams translate prototypes into durable implementation.
Public work such as open-source projects, talks, installations, experiments, writing, or other contributions to the design-technology community.

Responsibilities

Create high-quality, interactive prototypes that help teams explore emerging product opportunities and make better decisions.
Turn ambiguous customer, business, and technical questions into tangible experiences that can be evaluated, tested, and advanced.
Prototype across conversational, visual, spatial, multimodal, and agentic interfaces.
Determine the right level of fidelity for the question at hand, from a fast technical proof of concept to a polished, consumer-grade experience.
Use prototyping as a product-definition tool, not simply as a way to demonstrate an already-defined solution.
Help teams distinguish between ideas that are technically novel and experiences that create meaningful value for customers.
Partner with product designers and leaders to develop a strong point of view for how our experience should evolve.
Explore how conversational systems, dynamic interfaces, personalization, memory, recommendations, and agentic capabilities can work together as a coherent experience.
Translate capabilities emerging from Zillow’s design, research, and science teams into understandable and useful consumer interactions.
Identify where existing interface conventions are insufficient and prototype new patterns that can influence Zillow’s broader experience direction.
Bring rigor to questions of customer control, transparency, trust, responsiveness, and quality in AI-powered experiences.
Establish a high bar for interaction design, motion, responsiveness, visual polish, and the details that make an experience feel intuitive and alive.
Use motion and behavior to clarify system status, hierarchy, causality, transitions, and the relationship between customer actions and AI responses.
Collaborate closely with product designers to strengthen the craft and experiential quality of concepts.
Help teams see how technical and interaction decisions combine to create a coherent consumer experience.
Advocate for ambitious ideas while maintaining strong judgment about usability, accessibility, performance, and product clarity.
Build close working relationships with product design, research, product management, engineering, data science, and senior leadership.
Develop a deep understanding of Zillow’s consumer experience, customer needs, product strategy, technical architecture, and business model.
Partner with research teams and research-platform teams to bring emerging capabilities into product explorations and generate meaningful customer learning.
Work closely with agentic AI engineering and platform teams to understand new capabilities, influence technical direction, and identify opportunities for consumer application.
Translate fluently between design intent, product opportunity, research insight, and technical possibility.
Make complex systems and emerging technology understandable through clear demonstrations, narratives, and working experiences.
Proactively identify important experience questions and opportunities rather than waiting for fully formed assignments.
Lead exploratory work across organizational and product boundaries, bringing structure and momentum to ambiguous spaces.
Decide when to build directly, when to collaborate with a product team, and when to connect existing capabilities in a new way.
Help teams learn quickly without sacrificing craft or creating prototypes that misrepresent what the technology can do.
Develop reusable technical and interaction patterns when doing so will accelerate future work, while avoiding infrastructure for its own sake.
Mentor designers and technologists in prototyping, emerging technology, interaction craft, and technically informed product thinking.
Represent the work with clarity and conviction in critiques, technical reviews, customer-research sessions, and leadership discussions.