Senior Software Development Engineer
About The Position
The Senior Software Development Engineer will join Zillow’s Public Cloud Foundations team within Platform Engineering. The team builds an internal cloud platform—including self-service APIs, paved paths, and automation—that helps Zillow engineers use AWS safely and reliably. Current initiatives include self-service VPC connectivity, a Terraform delivery platform, managed container base images, and APIs for provisioning and policy capabilities. The role builds and owns backend services and APIs that make public-cloud capabilities such as account provisioning, networking, IAM, and policy self-service. It turns recurring manual cloud work into safe-by-default products, shapes platform interfaces and developer experiences based on internal customer needs and feedback, and owns production reliability through observability, SLOs, self-healing, on-call participation, and follow-up improvements. The engineer will use AI-assisted and agentic tools while maintaining quality and safety, and will influence Platform Engineering’s public-cloud enablement strategy. This position is categorized as Remote. Remote employees do not have a permanent corporate office workplace and work from a physical location of their choice that must be identified to the Company. U.S. employees may live in any of the 50 states, with limited exceptions. The position offers location-dependent base salary ranges and eligibility for equity awards.
Requirements
- At least 6 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend or platform services in production.
- System design skills for distributed systems and API-based platforms, with practical attention to simplicity, resiliency, and observability.
- Production experience in Golang or Python, or another modern programming language, and solid testing, code review, and debugging habits.
- Strong experience with at least one public cloud provider and its core primitives; AWS is preferred. Relevant primitives include VPCs, subnets, routing, load balancers, security groups, IAM, compute, and storage.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform, organized as reusable, tested software, including reviewing changes for safety and managing drift.
- Working knowledge of cloud security fundamentals, including IAM, network segmentation, encryption, and policy enforcement in multi-account environments.
- Hands-on experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and/or backend services.
- A bias toward eliminating toil by building software that makes repeated manual work unnecessary.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building or contributing to internal platforms or developer tooling, such as account vending, golden paths, or self-service provisioning.
- Experience treating an internal platform as a product by defining interfaces, measuring adoption, and improving developer experience.
- Familiarity with service-to-service networking, service mesh, workload identity, or rate limiting in cloud environments.
- Strong Linux systems and networking fundamentals.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own backend services and APIs for self-service cloud capabilities, including account provisioning, networking, IAM, and policy.
- Turn recurring manual cloud work and runbook-driven processes into safe-by-default APIs, controls, and automation.
- Understand internal teams’ use cases and shape platform interfaces and paved paths based on customer feedback and usage data.
- Own the reliability of production services by designing for observability, SLOs, and self-healing; participate in on-call and lead follow-up work to prevent recurring problems.
- Use AI-assisted and agentic tooling to accelerate design, implementation, and operations while maintaining quality and safety.
- Influence Platform Engineering’s approach to public-cloud enablement and contribute to design discussions and roadmap decisions.
Benefits
- Equity awards, with amounts based on factors such as experience, performance, and location.
- Flexible work location through Zillow’s distributed-work approach, subject to the stated remote-work conditions.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
