Senior Software Development Engineer

Overview

Senior Software Development Engineer on the Public Cloud Foundations team within Platform Engineering, building self-service backend services and APIs that abstract public cloud complexity, owned as products from design through operation.

What you'll do

• 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 by encoding patterns that depend on human judgment or hand-run runbooks into APIs, controls, and automation that are safe by default.
• Treat teams across Zillow as customers of the platform: understand their use cases, shape the interfaces and paved paths they build on, and let feedback and usage data drive the roadmap.
• Own the reliability of what you build by designing for observability, SLOs, and self-healing, and lead follow-up work that removes whole classes of problems rather than patching individual incidents.
• Be on call for the services you ship in production.
• 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.

What you'll need

• 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, or another modern language, with solid testing, code review, and debugging habits.
• Strong experience with at least one public cloud provider 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.

Nice to have

• Experience building or contributing to internal platforms or developer tooling (account vending, golden paths, self-service provisioning, or similar).
• Experience treating an internal platform as a product: defining interfaces, measuring adoption, and iterating on developer experience.
• Familiarity with service-to-service networking, service mesh, workload identity, or rate limiting in cloud environments.
• Strong Linux systems and networking fundamentals.

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.
• Base pay range of $164,400.00 - $262,600.00 annually in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC.
• Base pay range of $156,200.00 - $249,400.00 annually in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia.
• Also eligible for equity awards based on experience, performance and location.