Principal Full Stack Software Development Engineer

Zillow is a real estate technology company whose AI organization develops AI-powered experiences and services for customers and industry professionals. The Principal Full Stack Software Development Engineer will guide architecture and technical strategy for agentic AI systems, lead prototypes and infrastructure initiatives, and provide technical leadership through collaboration, mentoring, and development standards.

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate closely with applied scientists, engineering, design, and research to understand, scope, design, prototype, implement, and iterate on internal and external facing systems supporting and implementing next-generation AI applications
• Lead small working groups to build POCs and to prove out new agentic customer experiences and try out new infrastructure
• Set the tone of software development culture in Transaction AI with an emphasis on finding new and effective ways to leverage AI tools to increase the quality and scale of the engineering outputs
• Partner with Senior Product Leadership to align engineering capability to business strategy
• Set the standard for high-quality work through code reviews, mentoring, and the development of guidelines
• Provide leadership that helps navigate the team through complicated technical challenges
• Educate the science leadership of Transaction AI about the back-end systems being built or that you are proposing we build or adopt and connect them back to our teams core strategy and the wider AI org agentic strategy
• Support the growth and development of individuals and the team through interviewing, onboarding, and mentorship

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience building and shipping production-grade software or services
• Strong understanding of software design patterns and principles
• An understanding of the Machine Learning product development cycle and excitement to learn more about it
• You are comfortable contributing across the stack, including ETL, backend services, and product front-end
• You are fluent in languages such as Python, Typescript, and Javascript
• Strong use of and familiarity with AI coding tools and effective patterns of deploying AI agents to multiply your impact
• Are excited and comfortable communicating highly technical ideas with leaders and principles across technical disciplines - not just with other engineers
• Experience setting architecture vision and strategy for an organization
• Experience in developing highly available services at Internet scale
• Ability to collaborate across teams and leaders, indirectly influence others in a positive way, and navigate difficult conversations and decisions
• Have experience and passion for mentoring and guiding engineers, helping develop and grow technical leaders
• Experience developing applications that rely on generative AI or large language models and related technologies (knowledge retrieval solutions, for example)
• Experience collaborating with science, engineering, design, research and product partners in a team with a startup culture