Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend

Zillow

2d•$181,800 - $305,700•Remote

About The Position

You will primarily support five engineering teams and their partners in Product and Data Science on matters technical and strategic. You solve customer, business, and technical problems without authority over any team; your influence comes from the quality of your judgment and the relationships you cultivate. You will lead and mentor engineers across the organization and act as a domain expert and ambassador across Zillow Group. You will be the primary technical steward of the backend of the Post-Connect domain; it spans multiple languages, third-party integrations, and a distributed architecture running in AWS. But we are first and foremost a product engineering team, with customers as our north star. You choose where your effort will have the most leverage. You will take on the problems that are too large or too ambiguous for a single team to absorb. The job requires self-direction with occasional top-down assignments: there is no backlog curated for you. Success looks like framing a problem nobody has yet defined; asking tough questions to sharpen a plan; doing analysis that settles a build-versus-buy or an architecture decision; prototyping a new tool, pattern, or process yourself so the teams have a working exemplar to adopt; balancing your workload and delegating work that’s not essential for you to do. There’s plenty of ambiguity here, but also tremendous opportunity to improve how people buy and sell homes!

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating back-end or distributed systems in production environments.
Experience leading large-scale, highly available, and high-volume services or platforms, ideally in a cloud environment such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
Experience providing technical leadership across teams or domains, including setting architectural direction, influencing roadmaps, and driving complex initiatives from concept to production.
Or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the long-term technical strategy and architecture for back-end platforms and services, ensuring they are scalable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient in a cloud-native environment.
Lead design and implementation of high-throughput, low-latency APIs, data and event pipelines, and platform capabilities that support multiple Zillow brands, products, and machine learning workloads.
Solve the most complex technical problems on the team, making high-impact design decisions, setting engineering standards, and de-risking ambiguous initiatives through prototyping, experimentation, and data-driven tradeoffs.
Partner closely with product, data, and machine learning leaders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps, aligning cross-team dependencies and ensuring back-end systems enable great customer and partner experiences.
Mentor and coach senior engineers and tech leads, elevating engineering practices in areas such as reliability, performance, testing, incident response, and operational excellence across multiple teams.
Influence platform and data governance, security, and compliance practices, helping define guidelines, reviews, and guardrails that keep systems resilient and protect customer and partner data at scale.
Champion a culture of continuous improvement by driving adoption of modern back-end technologies, tooling, and workflows that improve developer experience, reduce friction, and increase delivery speed and quality.