Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Zillow is a leading real estate platform in the U.S., and they are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for their Guardians team. This role involves leading a team of engineers to enhance the Centralized Leads Platform, focusing on system reliability, modernization, and improving customer experiences through effective lead processing and observability strategies.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a high‑impact engineering team (~8 engineers) that builds and runs the backend services that take in customer inquiries and match them with the right real estate professionals and loan officers across phone, text, and CRM tools
• Modernize a mission‑critical platform, replacing legacy systems with more reliable, observable workflows so that lead processing is resilient, auditable, and easy to reason about for engineers and stakeholders
• Design end‑to‑end lead journeys in partnership with product, operations, and analytics — from the moment a consumer raises their hand through to hand‑off into partner systems — reducing friction and improving conversion for buy, sell, and finance customers
• Shape and execute the reliability and observability strategy, defining the roadmap, metrics, dashboards, and alerts that give teams fast, self‑service insight into system health and incidents
• Use data and AI‑powered insights to improve routing and lead quality, working with analytics and finance partners to define the signals and data products that help prioritize the right customers at the right time
• Raise the bar on operational excellence, including on‑call practices, incident response, post‑incident reviews, and runbooks, while continually reducing toil and improving the on‑call experience for engineers and partner teams
• Set clear goals, development plans, and performance expectations for each engineer, grow technical leaders within the team, and manage performance with clarity, empathy, and accountability
• Collaborate with peer engineering and product leaders across marketplace, CRM, contact center, and mortgage experiences to align APIs, contracts, and shared roadmaps around a cohesive long‑term vision for the leads platform

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing software engineering teams building backend or platform services, with direct responsibility for people leadership and regular software delivery to production
• Proven ability to understand business ambitions and align them with technical system capabilities, identifying gaps, navigating trade‑offs between short‑term and long‑term investments, and influencing architecture beyond your immediate team
• Deep experience designing and operating scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend or data systems, with an emphasis on testability, resiliency, and observability
• Strong track record running on‑call rotations, diagnosing and resolving critical production issues, improving observability and runbooks, and raising the bar on system health and operational rigor across teams
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to distill complex technical topics for audiences ranging from junior engineers to executives, and to create clear, reasoned design and strategy documents
• Demonstrated success building and developing engineering talent, including setting goals, providing regular feedback, mentoring senior and junior engineers, and managing performance issues with appropriate support and urgency
• Ability to make high‑judgment decisions in complex, ambiguous environments, balancing near‑term deliverables with long‑term platform vision and health
• Experience working on platform or infrastructure teams that support multiple product surfaces and internal customers, ideally in a large‑scale, high‑impact environment
• Hands‑on experience with event‑driven or workflow‑orchestrated systems and integrating with many upstream and downstream services
• Familiarity with observability tooling and practices (for example, Datadog, Splunk, metrics, logs, tracing) and using these signals to guide engineering investments and incident response
• Experience with public cloud platforms and container orchestration (such as AWS and Kubernetes), and with building secure‑by‑default, compliant systems in partnership with security and risk teams
• Prior exposure to marketplaces, lead routing, or CRM‑style systems, especially where experimentation, configuration, and routing quality have meaningful business impact