Senior Software Development Engineer

Zillow Group Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 161,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Zillow Group Inc. in the United States seeks a collaborative backend engineer to design, build, and scale evaluation frameworks for agentic AI experiences that power Zillow’s AI assistants.

You will work with applied scientists, ML engineers, and product leaders to ensure reliability, performance, and measurable impact while staying current with LLM tooling and evolving evaluation techniques. This remote role offers a base salary competitive with the market and equity opportunities; US-based

Qualifications

• 4+ years of backend engineering with ML services
• Experience building platform infrastructure consumed by multiple teams
• Familiarity with ML evals, observability, and LLM tooling
• Ability to partner across disciplines to deliver reliable AI platforms

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale evaluation frameworks for Zillow’s agentic AI experiences.
• Build tracing, observability, and quality measurement systems for production AI agents.
• Create platform infrastructure enabling domain teams to build atop the Evals platform.
• Collaborate with scientists and engineers to integrate new evaluation capabilities.
• Evolve how Zillow measures AI quality, reliability, and impact.
• Stay current with agentic AI paradigms and practical tooling.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs & reliability

ML evals & observability

LangChain / LangGraph

Developer tools for AI

Cross-team collaboration

LangSmith / Prompt tooling

Education

Advanced degree in CS/ML

Tools

Databricks MLflow

LangSmith

Braintrust

Promptfoo

Job description

About the team

The Agentic AI team at Zillow is transforming the real estate industry by helping millions of people use AI assistants to find their next home. We are building always-on AI experiences that combine personalized user insights with Zillow’s deep real estate knowledge. The Agentic Evals team focuses on one of the hardest parts of building AI experiences: measuring quality. We build evaluation frameworks, tracing systems, observability tools, and feedback loops that help teams understand what works, identify failure modes, and continuously improve AI assistant behavior. Our work ensures Zillow’s AI agents remain trustworthy, responsible, measurable, and ready to scale. As part of this lean, customer-focused team, you will partner with applied scientists, software engineers, machine learning engineers, and product leaders to evolve Zillow’s next-generation AI platform.

About the role

We are seeking a collaborative, product-minded backend engineer with strong Agentic AI fundamentals and a passion for building reliable, scalable systems that power AI applications. In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and scale evaluation frameworks for Zillow’s agentic AI experiences.
• Build tracing, observability, and quality measurement systems for production AI agents.
• Create platform infrastructure that enables domain teams across Zillow to build on top of the Evals platform without bottlenecks.
• Partner with applied scientists and machine learning engineers to integrate new AI evaluation capabilities into production systems.
• Help evolve how Zillow measures AI quality, reliability, trustworthiness, and product impact.
• Stay current with emerging agentic AI paradigms, evaluation techniques, and LLM tooling, and translate them into practical platform innovation.
• Support scaling, reliability, performance optimization, incident response, and cost management for the evaluation layer.
• Apply first-principles thinking to ambiguous problems and iterate quickly on novel solutions.

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 $160,900.00 - $257,100.00 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 $152,900.00 - $244,300.00 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 amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location. Employees in this role will not be paid below the salary threshold for exempt employees in the state where they reside.

Who you are

You are a roll-up-your-sleeves technical expert who can combine state-of-the-art AI technology with large-scale backend engineering. You thrive in ambiguous environments, enjoy solving challenging problems, and care deeply about creating reliable systems that other teams can trust.

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record of designing, shipping, and operating scalable production ML services
• Experience building platform infrastructure or developer-facing services consumed by multiple teams; you've thought carefully about APIs, user experience, reliability, and what it means to have internal customers
• Hands-on experience with ML Evals & Observability frameworks (Databricks MLflow, or evolving LLM frameworks preferred - LangSmith, Braintrust, Promptfoo, or similar)
• Experience evaluating third-party AI platforms and making principled build vs. buy decisions for platform infrastructure
• Fluency working across applied science, ML, product, design, and engineering; you translate between disciplines without losing precision
• Comfort with LLMs, agentic systems, and evaluation frameworks; familiarity with orchestration tools (LangChain, LangGraph, MCP, or similar)
• A habit of reaching for AI-assisted development tools in your own workflow; you don't just build for AI, you build with it
• Strong ownership and a growth mindset; you're energized by ambiguity, not slowed by it

Preferred qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience building products using frontier LLMs, multimodal models, or agent-based systems
• Experience designing and operating evaluation pipelines: offline batch evals, online scoring, cost/latency/signal tradeoffs, and closing the loop from user signals back to training data.

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., we help customers navigate buying, selling, financing and renting with greater ease and confidence. Whether you're working in tech, sales, operations, or design, you’ll be part of a company that's reshaping an industry and helping more people make home a reality.

Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the country. 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 identity or Veteran status.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact your recruiter directly.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable state and local law.

Los Angeles County applicants

Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

At Zillow, flexibility isn’t a perk - it’s how we work. 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.