Principal Software Development Engineer

About The Team The Developer Experience (DevEx) Delivery Engineering team builds and operates Zillow’s software delivery platform. This is the paved road from commit to production that every Zillow Group engineer relies on to build, test, deploy, and ship. The platform supports org-wide delivery infrastructure at meaningful scale: CI/CD, runners, GitLab, Artifactory, Progressive Delivery, mobile build and release, and legacy migration programs. We are shifting from hands-on infrastructure operations toward secure, compliant, AI-first paved paths that improve reliability, release safety, and developer productivity.

We are standing up a new India-based team to expand capacity, enable follow-the-sun coverage, and take first-class ownership of high-impact platform initiatives. As one of the founding members, you’ll help shape a brand-new engineering site while working on infrastructure that multiplies the productivity of the entire engineering organization.

What the team works on

• GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo): operate the central source-control and CI/CD platform and enable secure, AI-assisted SDLC workflows.
• CI/CD runners: modernize Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android runner fleets improving isolation, queueing, and cost attribution.
• Progressive Delivery: scale canary, health-gated, rollback-aware deployment patterns.
• Artifactory and supply chain: operate a Tier-0 artifact platform and improve upgrade, backup, retention, and lifecycle practices.
• Migration and modernization: retire legacy CI/CD (Concrete) using dashboards, partner engagement, and agentic migration.
• Mobile build/release and Mobile DevOps: sustain a high release cadence while modernizing build tooling.

Zillow Group is a strategic, mission-driven organization focused on delivering exceptional experiences and measurable outcomes. Our work spans cross-functional partnership, scalable programs and operational excellence in support of Zillow’s mission. We bring deep experience working across diverse teams in a dynamic, high-growth environment, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution to drive meaningful business impact. We are seeking an experienced professional to support our workforce expansion in India.

About The Role As the founding Principal Engineer for the India Delivery Engineering team, you’ll be the technical anchor for a brand-new site and the most senior individual contributor on the team. You’ll set the architecture for our most important platform systems, CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, and GitLab/Artifactory integrations. Drive standards that other teams adopt, and turn India’s ownership into durable technical authority through design reviews, reliability practices, and real deliverables from day one.

This is a hands-on, high-leverage role for someone who wants to lead platform architecture and mentor a growing team while partnering closely with engineering leaders across geographies.

What you’ll do

• Set the architecture for CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, GitLab/Artifactory integrations, and the paved paths all Zillow engineers use.
• Drive patterns and standards that other teams adopt, acting as design authority for India-owned areas in partnership with senior engineers across the org.
• Take the most ambiguous components from problem framing to production-ready, observable, well-documented systems.
• Hire and mentor engineers, raise the quality of code and design reviews, and help set the team’s engineering standards.
• Lead the safe adoption of AI across migration, code review, platform operations, incident triage, and rollout guidance.
• Shape on-call maturity, SLOs, incident response, runbooks, and reliability practices for the team’s services.
• Write clear design docs and distill complex platform tradeoffs for engineers, managers, partner teams, and executives across geographies

This role has been categorized as an Office position. “Office” employees regularly work at the Zillow India office for approximately 80 to 100 percent of their time each month. Employees must live within a reasonable commuting distance of the office. Zillow has not defined a reasonable distance, and expects employees will use judgment in determining this for themselves and understand the implications re: time commitment and cost of daily commute.

In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role are eligible for incen…