Principal, Workforce Management

Zillow

1d•$125,100 - $210,300•Remote

About The Position

At Zillow, we’re reimagining real estate to make it easier to unlock life’s next chapter. Our CX Operations team is a critical part of that experience—supporting customers and partners at key moments with speed, care, and expertise. The Workforce Management team ensures we have the right people, in the right place, at the right time to deliver a seamless customer experience. We partner closely with Operations, Product, Finance, and People teams to balance service quality, efficiency, and employee experience at scale. We are seeking a Principal, Workforce Management to evolve our strategic capacity and workforce planning across the organization. This role combines deep expertise in capacity planning, forecasting, and resource optimization with broader leadership in workforce strategy and WFM best practices. You will act as a thought leader and subject matter expert, shaping how we forecast demand, allocate resources, scale operations efficiently, and measure the effectiveness of both digital and human-led initiatives on our operations. You will build and operationalize scenario planning frameworks and “what if” analyses to assess demand variability, staffing impacts and cost implications. This role goes beyond execution—driving innovation, synthesizing complex data into strategic insights, influencing senior stakeholders, evolving capacity models, and linking WFM strategy to business performance. You won’t just improve existing systems—you’ll define what great looks like for WFM at Zillow.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in workforce management, capacity planning, or contact center analytics
Deep expertise in forecasting, staffing models, and contact center operations
Advanced skills in data analysis (SQL, Excel; Python/R a plus)
Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive alignment across teams
Experience operating in complex, high-volume, multi-product, multi-channel environments
Familiarity with contact center WFM tools (Aspect preferred)

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Operations, Finance, Business Administration, or a related quantitative field
Background in financial planning or operations strategy
Experience introducing new methodologies or transforming WFM functions
Experience in measuring the impact of new processes on contact center operations and customer experience metrics
Ability to travel up to 15% as needed.

Responsibilities

Advance Zillow’s WFM strategy for evolving CX operations
Lead the design and execution of demand forecast and scenario-based capacity planning models for nascent products, new lines of business, and non-traditional contact center scenarios to predict future staffing requirements, considering factors like seasonality, business growth, evolving technology integration and project pipelines
Establish scalable frameworks for forecasting, capacity planning, and resource optimization across multiple channels (voice, chat, email, ticketing, etc), incorporating non-human driven resources into future cost models (API calls, automated SMS texts, etc)
Engage with program and business partners, data science, operations, vendor management and finance teams to align on assumptions, inputs, and outputs for capacity planning models
Serve as the enterprise subject matter expert for capacity planning, forecasting, and workforce strategy, ensuring consistent methodology and alignment across all planning teams.
Act as a consultant for new business and/or models
Develop and implement strategic workforce plans that align with organizational goals across different time horizons, including identifying opportunities for AI and automation to enhance efficiency
Evaluate and introduce new technologies, automation, and AI-driven planning approaches to improve forecasting methodologies (regression, multi-variable simulation, LLM/AI models and other advanced techniques as appropriate)
Define and measure the impact of both digital and human-led initiatives on capacity inputs, providing clear, actionable insights to leadership on risks, trade-offs, and opportunities
Drives continuous improvement of WFM practices, with a focus on the application of AI/ML to improve accuracy and efficiency
Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on workforce strategy and operational readiness
Consult cross-functionally to shape the hiring, budgeting and operational strategy decisions for complex, ambiguous initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems
Role model best-in-class workforce planning practices, setting the standard for analytical rigor, strategic thinking, and decision-making across the WFM team