Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend

Zillow Group; United States; Remote; USD 191,000 - 305,000; Full time

Job summary

Zillow Group's Post-Connect Engineering org builds the backend that powers home tours, scheduling, and data pipelines in a cloud-native AWS environment. You will be the primary technical steward of the backend across multiple languages and integrations, shaping architecture with independence and judgment.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product, data science and ML leaders, translate business goals into technical roadmaps, and drive reliability, performance, and delivery speed across

Qualifications

Responsibilities

• Define and drive long-term backend strategy and architecture for cloud-native services.
• Lead design of high-throughput, low-latency APIs and data pipelines.
• Resolve complex technical problems with prototyping and data-driven tradeoffs.
• Partner with product, data, and ML leaders to translate goals into roadmaps.
• Mentor senior engineers and elevate reliability, performance, and incident response.
• Influence governance to protect data at scale.

Job description

About the team

Zillow is the top real estate website in the U.S., where millions of people come for help with their move. The hardest parts happen after the fun of browsing online, and the full process may span months. We empower home buyers by connecting them to the best professionals and tools to complete their move with confidence and ease.

The Post-Connect Engineering org owns the stretch of the journey that starts when a home buyer requests to tour a home and ends when their offer is under contract. It's all too easy for a buyer to be overwhelmed by the details and daunted by finding "the one" that fits the must-haves and the budget. Our job is to make touring and triaging homes easy to do with other people, so that buyers remain energized and able to actually move. Our systems manage appointments against real-world constraints, sustain rich conversations across disparate channels and apps, and convert a buyer's raw reactions to homes into actionable plans, with AI running throughout.

About the role

You will primarily support five engineering teams and their partners in Product and Data Science on matters technical and strategic. You solve customer, business, and technical problems without authority over any team; your influence comes from the quality of your judgment and the relationships you cultivate. You will lead and mentor engineers across the organization and act as a domain expert and ambassador across Zillow Group.

You will be the primary technical steward of the backend of the Post-Connect domain; it spans multiple languages, third-party integrations, and a distributed architecture running in AWS. But we are first and foremost a product engineering team, with customers as our north star. You choose where your effort will have the most leverage. You will take on the problems that are too large or too ambiguous for a single team to absorb. The job requires self-direction with occasional top-down assignments: there is no backlog curated for you.

Success looks like framing a problem nobody has yet defined; asking tough questions to sharpen a plan; doing analysis that settles a build-versus-buy or an architecture decision; prototyping a new tool, pattern, or process yourself so the teams have a working exemplar to adopt; balancing your workload and delegating work that's not essential for you to do. There's plenty of ambiguity here, but also tremendous opportunity to improve how people buy and sell homes!

You will get to

• Define and drive the long-term technical strategy and architecture for back-end platforms and services, ensuring they are scalable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient in a cloud-native environment.
• Lead design and implementation of high-throughput, low-latency APIs, data and event pipelines, and platform capabilities that support multiple Zillow brands, products, and machine learning workloads.
• Solve the most complex technical problems on the team, making high-impact design decisions, setting engineering standards, and de-risking ambiguous initiatives through prototyping, experimentation, and data-driven tradeoffs.
• Partner closely with product, data, and machine learning leaders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps, aligning cross-team dependencies and ensuring back-end systems enable great customer and partner experiences.
• Mentor and coach senior engineers and tech leads, elevating engineering practices in areas such as reliability, performance, testing, incident response, and operational excellence across multiple teams.
• Influence platform and data governance, security, and compliance practices, helping define guidelines, reviews, and guardrails that keep systems resilient and protect customer and partner data at scale.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement by driving adoption of modern back-end technologies, tooling, and workflows that improve developer experience, reduce friction, and increase delivery speed and quality.

This role has been categorized as a Remote position. "Remote" employees do not have a permanent corporate office workplace and, instead, 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 United States, with limited exceptions.

In California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $191,300.00 - $305,700.00 annually. This base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.

In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia the standard base pay range for this role is $181,800.00 - $290,400.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.

In addition to a competitive base salary this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location. Actual amoun