Principal Software Development Engineer

ZIND Zillow India Private Limited; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Zillow Group in Bengaluru seeks a founding Principal Engineer for the India Delivery Engineering site. You will set the architecture for our CI/CD platform, build/run infrastructure, and GitLab/Artifactory integrations, while mentoring a growing team and collaborating with global engineering leaders.

You will drive standards, lead design reviews, and enable AI‑first pipelines across migration, code review, and deployment activities, shaping a durable India‑owned platform.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with large‑scale CI/CD, build/runner infra, cloud‑native platforms, or SRE‑style systems.
• Strong design and architecture judgment for scalable, reliable systems with testability and observability.
• Technical leadership and influence without direct authority across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Set architecture for CI/CD execution, build/runner infra, and GitLab/Artifactory integrations.
• Drive patterns and standards adopted by other teams, as design authority for India‑owned areas.
• Tackle ambiguous components from problem framing to production‑ready, observable systems.
• Hire and mentor engineers, raise code/design review quality, and set engineering standards.
• Lead safe AI adoption across migration, code review, and deployment guidance.
• Shape on‑call maturity, SLOs, incident response, and runbooks.

Skills

CI/CD

System design

Python/Java/Go

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Code reviews

Mentorship

AI in SDLC

Leadership

Tools

GitLab

Artifactory

SaltStack

Ansible

Puppet

Job description

About the team

The Developer Experience (DevEx) Delivery Engineering team builds and operates Zillow's software delivery platform. This is the paved road from commit to production that every Zillow Group engineer relies on to build, test, deploy, and ship. The platform supports org-wide delivery infrastructure at meaningful scale: CI/CD, runners, GitLab, Artifactory, Progressive Delivery, mobile build and release, and legacy migration programs. We are shifting from hands‑on infrastructure operations toward secure, compliant, AI‑first paved paths that improve reliability, release safety, and developer productivity. We are standing up a new India‑based team to expand capacity, enable follow‑the‑sun coverage, and take first‑class ownership of high‑impact platform initiatives. As one of the founding members, you'll help shape a brand‑new engineering site while working on infrastructure that multiplies the productivity of the entire engineering organization. Zillow Group is a strategic, mission‑driven organization focused on delivering exceptional experiences and measurable outcomes. Our work spans cross‑functional partnership, scalable programs and operational excellence in support of Zillow’s mission. We bring deep experience working across diverse teams in a dynamic, high‑growth environment, balancing strategic thinking with hands‑on execution to drive meaningful business impact.

What the team works on

• -GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo): operate the central source‑control and CI/CD platform and enable secure, AI‑assisted SDLC workflows.
• -CI/CD runners: modernize Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android runner fleets improving isolation, queueing, and cost attribution.
• -Progressive Delivery: scale canary, health‑gated, rollback‑aware deployment patterns.
• -Artifactory and supply chain: operate a Tier‑0 artifact platform and improve upgrade, backup, retention, and lifecycle practices.
• -Migration and modernization: retire legacy CI/CD (Concrete) using dashboards, partner engagement, and agentic migration.
• -Mobile build/release and Mobile DevOps: sustain a high release cadence while modernizing build tooling.

About the role

As the founding Principal Engineer for the India Delivery Engineering team, you'll be the technical anchor for a brand‑new site and the most senior individual contributor on the team. You'll set the architecture for our most important platform systems, CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, and GitLab/Artifactory integrations. Drive standards that other teams adopt, and turn India's ownership into durable technical authority through design reviews, reliability practices, and real deliverables from day one. This is a hands‑on, high‑leverage role for someone who wants to lead platform architecture and mentor a growing team while partnering closely with engineering leaders across geographies.

This role has been categorized as an Office position. “Office” employees regularly work at the Zillow India office for approximately 80 to 100 percent of their time each month. Employees must live within a reasonable commuting distance of the office. Zillow has not defined a reasonable distance, and expects employees will use judgment in determining this for themselves and understand the implications re: time commitment and cost of daily commute.

In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role are eligible for incentive compensation subject to applicable laws and relevant Zillow policies. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location.

What you'll do

• Set the architecture for CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, GitLab/Artifactory integrations, and the paved paths all Zillow engineers use.
• Drive patterns and standards that other teams adopt, acting as design authority for India-owned areas in partnership with senior engineers across the org.
• Take the most ambiguous components from problem framing to production‑ready, observable, well‑documented systems.
• Hire and mentor engineers, raise the quality of code and design reviews, and help set the team's engineering standards.
• Lead the safe adoption of AI across migration, code review, platform operations, incident triage, and rollout guidance.
• Shape on‑call maturity, SLOs, incident response, runbooks, and reliability practices for the team's services.
• Write clear design docs and distill complex platform tradeoffs for engineers, managers, partner teams, and executives across geographies.

Who you are

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with extensive experience in large‑scale CI/CD, build/runner infrastructure, cloud‑native platform engineering, developer‑productivity tooling, or SRE/platform systems.
• Deep system design and architecture judgment for scalable, reliable, maintainable systems, with strong testability, resilience, security, and observability practices.
• Technical leadership and influence without direct authority, with a proven ability to align multiple teams on standards and tradeoffs.
• Production ownership: incident response, on‑call, operational debugging, capacity planning, and post‑incident prevention.
• Strong programming fundamentals in Python, Java, Go, or similar; able to review code, debug systems, and reason about performance and concurrency.
• Hands‑on or deep conceptual experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers, CI/CD platforms, and infrastructure as code.
• Exceptional written communication: design docs, strategy docs, decision records, rollout plans, and executive‑ready tradeoff summaries.
• Comfort operating async‑first across US–India time zones and helping build a new engineering culture.
• Bonus points Depth in GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo), runner fleets, or Artifactory.
• Experience with SaltStack, Ansible, Puppet, or comparable automation tooling.
• Mobile build infrastructure experience (iOS or Android).
• Prior experience applying AI in the software development lifecycle.
• Experience founding or scaling a new site or distributed engineering team.

Why join Founding role

• shape a new India engineering site and help set the technical and cultural bar from day one.
• High leverage: work on the platform used by every Zillow engineer and every major product surface.
• Modernization agenda: GitLab Dedicated, runner rearchitecture, Progressive Delivery, Artifactory modernization, and legacy retirement.
• AI‑first work: real production use cases across code review, migrations, incident analysis, and deployment safety.
• Global collaboration: partner directly with US engineering leaders while building durable India ownership.

Get to know us

At Zillow, we’re reimagining how people move—through the real estate market and through their careers. As the most‑visited real estate platform in the U.S., Zillow helps millions of customers navigate buying, selling, financing, and renting with greater ease and confidence. Our teams in India play a critical role in building and scaling the technology, products, and operations that power this experience. Whether you’re working in tech, operations, or shared services, you’ll collaborate with global partners to solve meaningful problems and help more people make home a reality. Zillow was named one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® in 2025, and included on the PEOPLE Companies That Care® 2025 list, reflecting our commitment to creating an innovative, inclusive, and engaging culture where employees are empowered to grow. No matter where you sit in the organization, your work will help drive innovation, support our customers, and move the industry—and your career—forward, together.

Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, maternity status, HIV status, or veteran status. Reasonable accommodations will be provided to candidates with disabilities, in accordance with applicable policies.

Cloud HQ is our distributed work model, built on trust, clear systems, and the belief that you can do great work from wherever you are. It’s not about where you work. It’s about moving forward - together.