Principal Product Manager, Platform Engineering

Zillow

4d•$169,300 - $284,700•Remote

About The Position

At Zillow Group, our mission is to empower people to unlock life's next chapter. The Platform Engineering team owns the infrastructure every engineer at Zillow builds on, spanning compute and runtime, networking and connectivity, databases, secrets and identity, and the delivery tooling that moves code to production. We are shifting from an infrastructure operations model to platform-as-a-product, replacing ticket queues and manual provisioning with golden paths, self-service, and API-first interfaces so that product teams can focus on business outcomes instead of operational complexity. Increasingly, this platform serves AI agents alongside the engineers directing them. Our self-service paths are evolving to support agent-driven, pipeline-driven, and hybrid workflows, making Platform Engineering foundational to how quickly and safely Zillow can build with AI. As a Principal Product Manager for Platform Engineering, you will own product strategy for the platform capabilities that every engineering team at Zillow depends on. You will define the golden paths teams follow by default, drive adoption and migration onto those paths across thousands of services, and establish the measurement and value model that makes the platform's impact visible to the business. This is the first dedicated product role in the organization. Platform Engineering has already built many of the foundations of a product operating model — customer discovery, written product requirements, and outcome metrics are how these teams work today — with engineering leaders carrying that work alongside running their teams. As a Principal Product Manager, you will raise the ceiling on that practice, partnering with engineering leadership across six teams to deepen discovery, sharpen prioritization, and organize the roadmap around customer problems and value streams rather than infrastructure layers. Your scope spans the full platform surface — though the areas you drive most directly will be shaped by where the leverage is greatest as near-term product needs across the teams stabilize. At this level, you will define the operating model other teams plan and build within, not just execute within it yourself.

Requirements

8+ years of product management experience, including substantial time building internal platforms, infrastructure, or developer tooling used by multiple teams across organizational boundaries
Experience owning a platform portfolio rather than a single product area — multiple interdependent capabilities with different customers, maturity levels, and lifecycles — and prioritizing across them
Strong technical fluency in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, including compute and container orchestration, networking, databases, identity and secrets, and CI/CD, sufficient to reason about architectural tradeoffs alongside senior engineers rather than gather requirements from them
Proven track record driving adoption of platform standards across teams you do not manage, using defaults, deprecation paths, and mechanisms that drove measurable change in behavior
Experience leading complex migrations at scale, including the full retirement of the systems they replaced
Able to operate in ambiguity and impose structure on complex, cross-functional infrastructure initiatives where scope is undefined and precedent is limited
Experience raising the product bar for engineering leaders who carry product responsibility, through coaching, shared standards, and durable artifacts rather than sole ownership
Familiarity with designing platform capabilities for AI agents as consumers, including where automated workflows require human approval and how automated paths are verified
Clear, structured communicator who can hold a coherent platform narrative across engineering, adjacent platform teams, and executive stakeholders

Nice To Haves

Candidates with non-traditional backgrounds are valued. Apply if you have transferable skills or related experiences.

Responsibilities

Own platform strategy across Platform Engineering's portfolio, turning independently run infrastructure roadmaps into a coherent product direction with explicit investment tradeoffs
Define the golden paths for how engineers build at Zillow, designing the platform so the supported path is the fastest one and unsupported patterns are difficult to fall into
Drive adoption and migration outcomes across teams with no reporting relationship to you, using defaults, deprecation paths, and enablement mechanisms that produce measurable change in how teams build
Define how applications and AI agents consume platform capabilities, establishing which self-service paths are agent-driven, which remain deterministic, and where human approval is required
Establish how platform success is measured — adoption, onboarding time, satisfaction, and key customer outcomes — and build the underlying value model of what capabilities cost to serve and what they are worth
Deepen the product operating model across six engineering teams, partnering with the engineering leaders who carry product responsibility to strengthen discovery, requirements, and outcome definition
Partner closely with Data Platform, Developer Experience, and Security teams to keep the internal developer experience coherent and resolve ownership gaps between organizations