Senior Platform Engineer, Cloud Foundations

Zillow; United States; On-site; USD 161,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Zillow is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to help build and own internal cloud platform services and APIs, turning cloud complexity into safe, well-documented products. You will focus on self-service provisioning, policy enforcement, and automation, with a product-minded approach.

Ideal candidates have 6+ years in backend/platform engineering, strong distributed systems design, and hands-on experience with AWS, Terraform, and modern CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience in backend/platform services.
• Strong design for distributed systems, API-based platforms, and observability.
• Production experience in Golang or Python; testing, code review, and debugging habits.
• Hands-on with at least one cloud provider (AWS preferred) and core primitives (VPCs, subnets, IAM).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and drift management.
• CI/CD experience for infrastructure/backend services; focus on eliminating toil.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own backend services and APIs that expose cloud capabilities as self-service products.
• Encode recurring manual cloud work into safe, automated APIs and runbooks.
• Collaborate with internal teams to shape platform interfaces and roadmap based on usage feedback.
• Ensure reliability with observability, SLOs, and self-healing capabilities; participate in on-call.
• Use AI-assisted tooling to accelerate design, implementation, and operations.

Skills

Senior software engineer

Distributed systems

Golang/Python

AWS cloud

CI/CD pipelines

Tools

Terraform

GitHub Actions

GitLab Pipelines

Jenkins

Argo

Job description

Zillow is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to help build and own internal cloud platform services and APIs, turning cloud complexity into safe, well-documented products. You will focus on self-service provisioning, policy enforcement, and automation, with a product-minded approach.

Ideal candidates have 6+ years in backend/platform engineering, strong distributed systems design, and hands-on experience with AWS, Terraform, and modern CI/CD pipelines.