Senior Software Development Engineer - Big Data

About the role

The Senior Software Development Engineer, Big Data designs, builds, and optimizes scalable data pipelines and infrastructure that power analytics and AI-driven capabilities across Zillow. This role applies advanced software engineering and big data expertise to create reliable, high-quality data products that enable teams to deliver innovative customer experiences and data-informed decisions.

You will get to

- 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.

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 $164,400.00 - $262,600.00 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 $156,200.00 - $249,400.00 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

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

- 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; Databricks is a plus.

- Or an equivalent combination of education and experience.