Senior Backend Architect & Tech Leader — Remote

Zillow Group Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 305,000; Full time

Job summary

Zillow Group, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend to lead the backend of the Post-Connect domain, spanning multiple languages and AWS-based distributed systems.

You will mentor engineers, set architectural direction, and partner with product and data science teams to translate business goals into scalable roadmaps. Remote-friendly role with opportunities to influence across Zillow brands and ML workloads; we value reliability, performance, security, and cost

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating back-end or distributed systems.
• Experience leading large-scale, highly available, high-volume services or platforms in cloud environments.
• Experience providing technical leadership across teams, setting architectural direction and roadmaps.
• Experience with cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Responsibilities

• 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 across multiple Zillow brands and ML workloads.
• Solve complex technical problems, make high-impact design decisions, and de-risk initiatives through prototyping and data-driven tradeoffs.
• Partner with product, data, and ML leaders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and align cross-team dependencies.
• Mentor and coach senior engineers and tech leads, elevating practices in reliability, performance, testing, incident response, and operations.
• Influence platform and data governance, security, and compliance practices to protect customer and partner data at scale.
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement by adopting modern back-end technologies and improving developer experience.

Skills

Backend architectures

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Technical leadership

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/related field

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Zillow Group, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend to lead the backend of the Post-Connect domain, spanning multiple languages and AWS-based distributed systems.

You will mentor engineers, set architectural direction, and partner with product and data science teams to translate business goals into scalable roadmaps. Remote-friendly role with opportunities to influence across Zillow brands and ML workloads; we value reliability, performance, security, and cost