Principal Product Technologist

Zillow

6d•$169,300 - $284,700•Remote

About The Position

The Product Development Transformation team is building something genuinely new at Zillow. We’re a small, mission-driven team charged with evolving how Zillow develops products: bringing experimentation earlier into the process, creating a shared language for learning and discovery, and shifting the culture toward a passion for building and creating in the age of AI. We believe in doing before theorizing. We prototype our own processes. We run experiments on our own workflows. We use AI as a democratizing force that turns every team member into a builder, regardless of role. We’re here to make that real, and we’re looking for someone who wants to help build the engine that makes it go. As a Principal Product Technologist on the Product Development Transformation team, you are the technical heartbeat of the team’s ability to build, learn, and scale. You’ll design and develop AI-powered tools and capabilities that help Zillow’s product teams discover knowledge, run structured experiments, and make better decisions faster, starting with our Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) and expanding from there. You will work cross-functionally to help instrument the tools to tell us whether the transformation is actually working, turning operational signals into organizational insight. This is a role where the intersection of disciplines is the job. You bring engineering depth and product instincts. You’re energized by ambiguity, not paralyzed by it. You love building something real, putting it in front of real people, and learning from what happens next. You understand that the magic of a truly transformative system isn’t just in the idea. It’s in the hard, unglamorous work of bringing it all the way to life.

Requirements

Strong communication, influence, and collaboration skills; you can make the complex feel human
7–10 years of experience in software engineering, technical product development, or an adjacent discipline with meaningful depth
Deep experience designing and building AI-powered systems, including agentic architectures, LLM orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool integration patterns
Strong prototyping instincts, with the ability to build something real enough to generate meaningful feedback, fast
Proven experience translating organizational and operational challenges into scalable technical solutions
Experience working across diverse, cross-functional teams with demonstrated influence beyond formal authority
Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and collaborative development tooling
Experience partnering with data science teams to define instrumentation strategies, design metric frameworks, and build pipelines that turn operational signals into meaningful insight
Comfort reasoning about organizational health at a systems level, not just a product or feature level; you think in feedback loops and compounding returns, not just shipping cycles
A portfolio or track record of ambitious, high-quality technical work, ideally including examples of systems that changed how a team operated
An infectious optimism, a creative hacker’s approach, and a genuine passion for the intersection of technology, product, and human behavior

Responsibilities

Build and iterate on AI-powered tools and capabilities that help Zillow’s product teams learn faster, decide better, and do more meaningful work
Rapidly prototype solutions that compress key stages of the product development cycle, getting real learning into teams’ hands sooner
Collaborate deeply with data science and engineering to bring new capabilities to life at scale, contributing to the architectural patterns, data pipelines, and integration standards that make the work sustainable
Partner closely with product managers, researchers, and senior leadership to translate ambitious transformation goals into working, real-world systems
Influence the technical architecture for AI-powered systems designed to scale across teams, organizations, and use cases
Present work to partners and senior leadership with clarity and energy; make complex systems feel accessible and transformative outcomes feel real
Lead projects independently, bringing structure to ambiguous problems and delivering high-quality outcomes with urgency and care
Contribute, learn, grow, and help shape what this team becomes