Senior Software Development Engineer - Big Data

Overview

Design, build, and optimize scalable data pipelines and infrastructure that power analytics and AI-driven capabilities across Zillow, including a shared AI context and agent platform.

What you'll do

• Architect and implement scalable, secure, and observable data pipelines and services that collect, process, and store large, diverse data sets to support analytics, machine learning, and product use cases.
• Design and optimize data models, storage patterns, and processing frameworks to meet performance, reliability, and cost objectives for high-volume, real-time, and batch workloads.
• Lead technical design reviews, code reviews, and best-practice guidance for Big Data solutions, mentoring engineers on topics such as data quality, resiliency, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate with product, analytics, data science, and platform engineering teams, and company stakeholders, to translate business and modeling requirements into robust, production-grade data solutions and APIs.
• Implement and maintain automated testing, monitoring, and alerting for data services, proactively improving reliability, data quality, and incident response.
• Evaluate and introduce new big data technologies, tools, and patterns to improve developer productivity, platform scalability, and end-to-end data lifecycle management.
• Document data flows, interfaces, and operational runbooks, and contribute to shared standards and patterns for Big Data engineering across the organization.
• Build the company context layer and agentic platform tools, authentication, and APIs that teams across Zillow use at scale.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on building and operating data-intensive or distributed systems.
• Experience designing, implementing, and supporting production data pipelines and platforms using modern big data, streaming, and/or cloud-native technologies.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners (e.g., product, analytics, and data science) to deliver scalable data solutions that support business, analytics, and AI needs.
• Hands-on experience building agentic solutions or skills with major AI tools and internal platform tools used by many teams.

Nice to have

• Databricks experience.

Details

• Remote position; employees work from a physical location of their choice that must be identified to the Company.
• U.S. employees may live in any of the 50 United States, with limited exceptions.
• Most employees have flexibility to work from wherever they are most productive (Cloud HQ distributed work model).
• Base pay: $164,400–$262,600 annually in CA, CT, MD, MA, NJ, NY, WA state, and DC; $156,200–$249,400 annually in CO, HI, IL, ME, MN, NV, OH, RI, VT, and VA. Eligible for equity awards.