[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer, Big Data @Zillow

Role Description

This is an opportunity to shape the future of Zillow’s real‑time data platform and the experiences we deliver to customers. As a Senior Software Engineer, Big Data on the Streaming team, you will design and evolve the streaming infrastructure that hundreds of internal services rely on every day.

• Independently lead the design and evolution of distributed streaming systems, control planes, and developer tooling.
• Focus on scalability, reliability, and long‑term platform sustainability.

You Will Get To:

• Design, build, and operate large‑scale Kafka and Flink infrastructure supporting tier‑0 and tier‑1 workloads.
• Lead critical initiatives in our streaming platform modernization, including platform architecture evolution.
• Develop and enhance streaming control planes, APIs, CLIs, and provisioning systems.
• Improve platform reliability through SLO definition, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and automation.
• Enable simplified stream processing patterns for product and engineering teams.
• Evaluate and integrate modern streaming ecosystem capabilities.
• Make high‑quality architectural decisions under ambiguity.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to raising the bar on distributed systems design.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale distributed systems.
• Significant production experience with Kafka and/or Flink.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala.
• Experience operating services in cloud environments (e.g., AWS) and working with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Experience designing scalable, multi‑tenant systems.
• Experience defining and operating against SLOs.
• Familiarity with infrastructure‑as‑code tooling such as Terraform and CI/CD systems.
• Strong systems design skills.
• Experience collaborating across platform and product teams.

Requirements

• Experience working with streaming vendors (e.g., Confluent, MSK, Redpanda).
• Demonstrated experience leading system design efforts for complex, multi‑team platform initiatives.
• Experience integrating streaming systems with analytics platforms such as Databricks.
• Background in reliability engineering or platform engineering.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary.
• Equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance, and location.