Senior Backend Platform Engineer – Self-Service Cloud

Zillow Group; United States; Remote; USD 164,000 - 263,000; Full time

Job summary

Zillow Group is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer, Backend for the Public Cloud Foundations team. You will design, build, and own backend services and APIs that make cloud capabilities self-service for Zillow engineers, turning complex cloud work into reusable products.

You’ll work on account provisioning, networking, IAM, policy interfaces, and aim for observability, reliability, and safety. This remote role offers flexible work arrangements within the US.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend or platform services in production.
• Solid system design skills for distributed systems and API-based platforms, with a practical approach to simplicity, resiliency, and observability.
• Production experience in Golang or Python (preferred), or another modern language, with solid testing, code review, and debugging habits.
• Strong experience with at least one public cloud provider (preferably AWS) and its core primitives such as VPCs, subnets, routing, load balancers, security groups, IAM, compute, and storage, deep enough to abstract them behind clean interfaces.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform, structured as reusable, tested software rather than copy-paste configuration, including reviewing changes for safety and managing drift.
• Working knowledge of cloud security fundamentals, e.g., IAM, network segmentation, encryption, and policy enforcement in multi-account environments.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo) for infrastructure and/or backend services.
• A bias toward eliminating toil in software: when you see repeated manual work, your instinct is to build the system that makes it unnecessary.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own backend services and APIs that make cloud capabilities self-service: account provisioning, networking, IAM, and policy exposed as clean software interfaces rather than tickets or manual processes.
• Turn recurring cloud work into products. Take patterns that today depend on human judgment or hand-run runbooks and encode them into APIs, controls, and automation that are safe by default.
• Treat teams across Zillow as the customers of your platform: understand their use cases, shape the interfaces and paved paths they build on, and let their feedback and usage data drive your roadmap.
• Own the reliability of what you build. Design for observability, SLOs, and self-healing so the platform runs itself. Like any team that owns services in production, you'll be on call for what you ship, and you'll lead the follow-up work that removes whole classes of problems rather than patching individual incidents.
• Use modern AI-assisted and agentic tooling to accelerate design, implementation, and operations while keeping quality and safety high.
• Influence how Platform Engineering approaches public cloud enablement, bringing a product mindset to design discussions and roadmap decisions. You'll help take a set of foundational capabilities and turn them into a cohesive, self-service platform that Zillow engineers experience as a product, not a queue.

Skills

Golang

Python

Distributed systems design

CI/CD engineering

Cloud platforms (AWS)

Terraform

Observability & SLOs

Networking fundamentals

Tools

Terraform

GitLab Pipelines

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Argo

Job description

Zillow Group is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer, Backend for the Public Cloud Foundations team. You will design, build, and own backend services and APIs that make cloud capabilities self-service for Zillow engineers, turning complex cloud work into reusable products.

You’ll work on account provisioning, networking, IAM, policy interfaces, and aim for observability, reliability, and safety. This remote role offers flexible work arrangements within the US.