Senior AI-Native Product Engineer, Mobile

Zillow

1d•$152,900 - $257,100•Remote

About The Position

The Mercury Mobile team builds Zillow Instant Messaging (ZIM) — the conversation layer where millions of movers participate in a multiplayer, integrated experience to find their next home. We own the messaging experience on both iOS and Android, from the real-time messaging core through the rich, interactive content inside every conversation. Our larger organization is responsible for turning interest in a home into a completed tour, a durable relationship with an agent, and a successful move. Right now we are rebuilding what a messaging product can be when an AI assistant is a participant in the conversation rather than a feature bolted onto it. As a Senior Software Development Engineer on Mercury Mobile, you will define how AI shows up inside ZIM on mobile — and you will do it on both platforms. This is deliberately a cross-platform role: you will work in Swift and Kotlin, and the architectural decisions you make will land on iOS and Android together rather than diverging. The problems are the interesting ones in mobile client engineering today: streaming AI responses into a live conversation without janking the UI, rendering multi-modal and richly structured content that exceeds what a message bubble was ever designed to hold, and building it all to work on a spotty connection in a driveway. You will have real ownership of the architecture, and a team that expects you to use it.

Requirements

5+ years building and shipping native mobile applications at consumer scale, with a deep understanding of the app lifecycle
Production experience on both iOS and Android — or deep expertise in one platform and demonstrated delivery in the other
Fluent in Swift and Kotlin, and comfortable in SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose
Built features on top of real-time or streaming data, and you know where the hard parts are
Integrated GraphQL clients and reasoned carefully about caching and cache invalidation
Use AI coding agents on real production work and have a considered point of view on where they help and where they do not
Owned the architecture of a module or platform that other teams depended on, and you write the documentation that makes adoption possible
Communicate clearly with engineers, product managers, and designers, and you make your trade-offs explicit
Hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or have equivalent work experience

Nice To Haves

Experience integrating LLM or generative AI features into a consumer mobile product
Experience with messaging, chat, or communications products
Experience with on-device inference or streaming/token-level UI rendering
A track record of driving technical standards adoption beyond your immediate team

Responsibilities

Design and ship the mobile client architecture for AI in conversations — streaming responses, topic-based conversation structures, and multi-modal content rendering across iOS and Android
Own cross-platform architectural decisions for the ZIM messaging core, keeping Swift and Kotlin implementations converged rather than letting them drift
Build real-time, resilient messaging experiences that hold up on unreliable mobile networks, with observability and SLOs you define
Partner directly with the AI, Web, and Backend teams shaping Zillow's conversational AI roadmap, and represent mobile in those decisions
Use AI coding agents as a genuine part of your workflow — and help set the standards for how the team does it well
Raise the bar on testing and delivery velocity through unit, snapshot, and UI automation, and shared tooling other teams adopt
Mentor engineers across both platforms and grow the team's cross-platform depth