Principal Software Development Engineer

The Developer Experience (DevEx) Delivery Engineering team builds and operates Zillows software delivery platform. This is the paved road from commit to production that every Zillow Group engineer relies on to build test deploy and ship. The platform supports org-wide delivery infrastructure at meaningful scale: CI/CD runners GitLab Artifactory Progressive Delivery mobile build and release and legacy migration programs. We are shifting from hands-on infrastructure operations toward secure compliant AI-first paved paths that improve reliability release safety and developer productivity.
We are standing up a new India-based team to expand capacity enable follow-the-sun coverage and take first-class ownership of high-impact platform initiatives. As one of the founding members youll help shape a brand-new engineering site while working on infrastructure that multiplies the productivity of the entire engineering organization.
What the team works on
-GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo): operate the central source-control and CI/CD platform and enable secure AI-assisted SDLC workflows.
-CI/CD runners: modernize Linux macOS iOS and Android runner fleets improving isolation queueing and cost attribution.
-Progressive Delivery: scale canary health-gated rollback-aware deployment patterns.
-Artifactory and supply chain: operate a Tier-0 artifact platform and improve upgrade backup retention and lifecycle practices.
-Migration and modernization: retire legacy CI/CD (Concrete) using dashboards partner engagement and agentic migration.
-Mobile build/release and Mobile DevOps: sustain a high release cadence while modernizing build tooling.

Zillow Group is a strategic mission-driven organization focused on delivering exceptional experiences and measurable outcomes. Our work spans cross-functional partnership scalable programs and operational excellence in support of Zillows mission. We bring deep experience working across diverse teams in a dynamic high-growth environment balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution to drive meaningful business impact. We are seeking an experienced professional to support our workforce expansion in India.

As the founding Principal Engineer for the India Delivery Engineering team youll be the technical anchor for a brand-new site and the most senior individual contributor on the team. Youll set the architecture for our most important platform systems CI/CD execution build and runner infrastructure and GitLab/Artifactory integrations. Drive standards that other teams adopt and turn Indias ownership into durable technical authority through design reviews reliability practices and real deliverables from day one.

This is a hands-on high-leverage role for someone who wants to lead platform architecture and mentor a growing team while partnering closely with engineering leaders across geographies.

What youll do

• Set the architecture for CI/CD execution build and runner infrastructure GitLab/Artifactory integrations and the paved paths all Zillow engineers use.

• Drive patterns and standards that other teams adopt acting as design authority for India-owned areas in partnership with senior engineers across the org.

• Take the most ambiguous components from problem framing to production-ready observable well-documented systems.

• Hire and mentor engineers raise the quality of code and design reviews and help set the teams engineering standards.

• Lead the safe adoption of AI across migration code review platform operations incident triage and rollout guidance.

• Shape on-call maturity SLOs incident response runbooks and reliability practices for the teams services.

• Write clear design docs and distill complex platform tradeoffs for engineers managers partner teams and executives across geographies

This role has been categorized as an Office position. Office employees regularly work at the Zillow India office for approximately 80 to 100 percent of their time each month. Employees must live within a reasonable commuting distance of the office. Zillow has not defined a reasonable distance and expects employees will use judgment in determining this for themselves and understand the implications re: time commitment and cost of daily commute.

In addition to a competitive base pay employees in this role are eligible for incentive compensation subject to applicable laws and relevant Zillow policies. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience performance and location.

• 10 years of software engineering experience with extensive experience in large-scale CI/CD build/runner infrastructure cloud-native platform engineering developer-productivity tooling or SRE/platform systems.

• Deep system design and architecture judgment for scalable reliable maintainable systems with strong testability resilience security and observability practices.

• Technical leadership and influence without direct authority with a proven ability to align multiple teams on standards and tradeoffs.

• Production ownership: incident response on-call operational debugging capacity planning and post-incident prevention.

• Strong programming fundamentals in Python Java Go or similar; able to review code debug systems and reason about performance and concurrency.

• Hands-on or deep conceptual experience with AWS Kubernetes Terraform containers CI/CD platforms and infrastructure as code.

• Exceptional written communication: design docs strategy docs decision records rollout plans and executive-ready tradeoff summaries.

• Comfort operating async-first across USIndia time zones and helping build a new engineering culture.

Bonus points

• Depth in GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo) runner fleets or Artifactory.

• Experience with SaltStack Ansible Puppet or comparable automation tooling.

• Mobile build infrastructure experience (iOS or Android).

• Prior experience applying AI in the software development lifecycle.

• Experience founding or scaling a new site or distributed engineering team.

Why join

• Founding role: shape a new India engineering site and help set the technical and cultural bar from day one.

• High leverage: work on the platform used by every Zillow engineer and every major product surface.

• Modernization agenda: GitLab Dedicated runner rearchitecture Progressive Delivery Artifactory modernization and legacy retirement.

• AI-first work: real production use cases across code review migrations incident analysis and deployment safety.

• Global collaboration: partner directly with US engineering leaders while building durable India ownership.

At Zillow were reimagining how people movethrough the real estate market and through their careers.

As the most-visited real estate platform in the U.S. Zillow helps millions of customers navigate buying selling financing and renting with greater ease and confidence. Our teams in India play a critical role in building and scaling the technology products and operations that power this experience.

Whether youre working in tech operations or shared services youll collaborate with global partners to solve meaningful problems and help more people make home a reality.

Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the U.S.. 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 industryand your careerforward 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 maternity status HIV status or veteran status. Reasonable accommodations will be provided to candidates with disabilities in accordance with applicable policies.