Senior Software Development Engineer

Role Description

As a Senior Software Development Engineer on Public Cloud Foundations, you will build the services and APIs that abstract away the complexity of the public cloud, and own them as products from design through operation.

• 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.
• 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.

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary.
• Eligible for equity awards based on factors such as 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.