About the role

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who can set the technical and data-product direction for one of the most consequential data foundations at Zillow, the governed layer behind how we understand and improve the customer experience.

The customer experience organization runs across many systems, business lines, and support channels, and today the same business question can get different answers depending on the source, dashboard, or team producing it. As we move further into AI-assisted service, self-service analytics, and conversational analytics, governed, reusable, AI-ready data foundations become essential.

As a Principal Business Intelligence Manager, you will own the target-state architecture, the semantic-layer strategy, the taxonomy and definition standards, the cross-system identity and linkage strategy, and the reusable data-product patterns that make this ecosystem trustworthy and scalable. You will lead through technical depth, architecture, influence, and hands-on problem-solving, partnering as a peer with senior engineers, BI and analytics leaders, data-platform partners, and stakeholders across product, finance, sales, and operations. You set the business architecture, semantic standards, data-product direction, and source-of-truth strategy that guide what BI and Data Engineering build toward, and Data Engineering owns the production pipelines and platform implementation.

You Will Get To

• Dive deep into Zillow's internal and third-party data to model the customer journeys, operational workflows, workforce structures, financial measurement, and product signals that define customer experience operations.
• Set the target-state architecture for the data foundation, defining how data domains, source systems, grains, identities, taxonomy, and semantic logic fit together from raw signal through to BI, analytics, data science, and AI consumption.
• Design reusable semantic-layer and metrics-as-code patterns that make governed metrics, dimensions, and business logic consumable across Tableau, Databricks, self-service and conversational analytics, and machine-learning and AI workflows.
• Drive alignment on metric definitions, taxonomy standards, source-of-truth expectations, data-product certification, and cross-system identity strategy across business lines, partner teams, and leadership.
• Lead cross-organizational data initiatives tied to company strategy, customer experience priorities, AI enablement, and multi-year roadmap planning, including build-versus-buy recommendations for analytics tooling, semantic-layer platforms, governance systems, and customer-intelligence tooling.
• Partner with Data Engineering, Product Analytics, and central data-platform teams on implementation patterns, with ownership staying clear, you set the business architecture, semantic standards, and source-of-truth strategy, and they own production pipelines and platform implementation.
• Set quality, monitoring, documentation, and reliability expectations for critical data products and reporting surfaces, reducing dependence on individual subject-matter experts so issues are caught early and resolved quickly.
• Mentor senior Business Intelligence Managers, analysts, and analytics engineers by shaping the technical standards, reusable patterns, and strategic direction for business intelligence across the organization.

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 $143,600.00 - $229,400.00 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 $136,400.00 - $218,000.00 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

• 10+ years in data architecture, enterprise data modeling, analytics engineering, or business intelligence data-product leadership, including principal- or staff-level technical ownership of a large, multi-system data environment.
• Expert SQL and data modeling, with experience designing architectures that span multiple business domains, source systems, grains, customer journeys, and consumption patterns.
• Deep expertise in semantic-layer design, metrics-as-code patterns, metric-definition governance, reusable dimensional modeling, and data governance at organizational scale.
• A strong grasp of how AI systems, natural-language query experiences, and machine-learning workflows consume structured, governed data.
• Experience owning or heavily shaping taxonomy, source-of-truth, identity resolution, or semantic governance standards across competing stakeholders and business lines.
• Experience evaluating, adopting, or influencing analytics-engineering tooling at the organizational level, such as Databricks, dbt, Snowflake, semantic-layer platforms, or Tableau.
• Excellent communication and partner-management skills, with a consistent ability to gain alignment across product, engineering, analytics, finance, sales, operations, and executive stakeholders.
• You thrive as a hands-on individual contributor. You lead through technical depth, architecture, credibility, and influence, and you are energized by staying close to the work.
• Strong judgment around decision rights, you know when to recommend, when to facilitate, when to escalate, and when leadership or cross-functional partners need to ratify a decision.
• Here at Zillow, we value the experience and perspective of candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. We encourage you to apply if you have transferable skills or related experiences.

Preferred, Nice To Have

• Experience in a customer experience, customer support, operations, marketplace, or multi-product customer journey data domain.
• Experience reconciling competing sources of truth, for example workforce or HR systems versus operational systems.
• Experience partnering with, or working inside, a central data platform, product analytics, or data engineering organization.
• Familiarity with making data foundations ready for AI and self-service analytics, including governed semantic models, natural-language query tools, and AI-ready data products.
• Experience with taxonomy tagging, customer-intelligence systems, contact-driver analysis, interaction intelligence, or journey analytics.
• A track record of mentoring and upleveling BI professionals, analysts, and analytics engineers as a senior technical leader.