Zillow is a leading real estate platform in the U.S. seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to design, build, and operate the core infrastructure for Zillow Rentals. The role involves collaborating with various engineering teams to ensure secure, reliable, and scalable systems across cloud platforms.
Responsibilities:
- Design, implement, and operate production infrastructure in GCP and/or AWS, supporting high-scale, business-critical services for Zillow Rentals
- Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (primarily with Terraform), including modules, state management, and reusable patterns for platform services
- Own Kubernetes platforms (e.g., GKE/EKS): perform cluster upgrades, tune workloads, manage Teraform, ArgoCD/Helm-based deployments, and debug complex production issues
- Architect and secure cloud networking (VPCs, subnets, routing, load balancers, DNS, TLS, VPN, WAF) and ingress/egress patterns for internal and external traffic
- Improve observability and operations by defining metrics, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks that raise the bar for reliability and incident response
Requirements:
- 4+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating production systems in GCP and/or AWS (at least one at depth, both strongly preferred)
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Experience with Terraform and IaC practices (modules, state management) for managing cloud infrastructure and platform services
- Cloud networking: Proven experience with cloud networking (VPC design, subnets, routing, NAT, security groups/firewalls, load balancers, DNS, TLS, VPN) and securing ingress/egress paths (e.g., ALB/ALB controller, CloudFront, GCP load balancers, WAF/Cloud Armor)
- Kubernetes: Deep experience running Kubernetes in production (e.g., GKE, EKS), including cluster upgrades, workload configuration with ArgoCD / Helm, and incident debugging
- Must have bullet point: 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
- Experience in Database management and operations
- Provisioning with tools such as Ansible and Packer
- Programming experience with Java or Python