Senior Software Development Engineer - Big Data

Zillow

3d•$156,200 - $262,600•Remote

About The Position

The Senior Software Development Engineer, Big Data designs, builds, and optimizes scalable data pipelines and infrastructure that power analytics and AI-driven capabilities across Zillow. The role applies advanced software engineering and big data expertise to create reliable, high-quality data products that help teams deliver innovative customer experiences and make data-informed decisions. The Big Data Engineering team builds scalable data platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for analytics, machine learning, and AI-driven experiences across Zillow. Its newest effort is a shared AI context and agent platform. The team works at the intersection of software engineering and data, values collaboration, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement, and tackles complex data challenges at scale. This position is categorized as remote. Remote employees do not have a permanent corporate office and work from a physical location of their choice, which must be identified to the Company. U.S. employees may live in any of the 50 states, with limited exceptions. The role is eligible for equity awards in addition to base salary. Base pay ranges vary by location: $164,400–$262,600 annually in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC; and $156,200–$249,400 annually in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. Actual compensation varies based on experience, performance, and location.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
8+ years of software engineering experience focused on building and operating data-intensive or distributed systems.
Experience designing, implementing, and supporting production data pipelines and platforms using modern big data, streaming, and/or cloud-native technologies.
Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners, such as product, analytics, and data science, to deliver scalable data solutions that support business, analytics, and AI needs.
Hands-on experience building agentic solutions or skills with major AI tools and internal platform tools used by many teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Databricks.

Responsibilities

Architect and implement scalable, secure, and observable data pipelines and services to collect, process, and store large, diverse data sets for analytics, machine learning, and product use cases.
Design and optimize data models, storage patterns, and processing frameworks for performance, reliability, and cost objectives across high-volume, real-time, and batch workloads.
Lead technical design reviews and code reviews, provide best-practice guidance for Big Data solutions, and mentor engineers on data quality, resiliency, and operational excellence.
Collaborate with product, analytics, data science, platform engineering teams, and company stakeholders to translate business and modeling requirements into production-grade data solutions and APIs.
Implement and maintain automated testing, monitoring, and alerting for data services, proactively improving reliability, data quality, and incident response.
Evaluate and introduce big data technologies, tools, and patterns to improve developer productivity, platform scalability, and end-to-end data lifecycle management.
Document data flows, interfaces, and operational runbooks, and contribute to shared Big Data engineering standards and patterns across the organization.
Build the company context layer and agentic platform tools, authentication, and APIs used at scale by teams across Zillow.