Principal Service Designer - Zillow Home Loans

About the team

Zillow’s mission is to give people the power to unlock life’s next chapter. The Experience Strategy & Architecture team is central to that mission, with the ambition to grow Zillow’s business by orchestrating how experiences fit together so people trust Zillow to guide them every step of the way home.

The team is currently leading a company-wide transformation, and this role will be critical to the success of that. It will be highly visible, helping to shape product strategy, while also influencing on-the-ground frontline operations.

About the role

As a Principal Service Designer on the financing team, you'll shape how millions of people experience the most complex, high-stakes transaction of their lives — buying or financing a home. You'll work at the intersection of Zillow Home Loans, real estate operations, and digital product experiences to define service strategies that connect customer needs, business goals, and operational realities. This is a highly visible role with the opportunity to influence long-term experience direction while driving meaningful improvements across teams and channels.

You Will Get To:

Lead Experience Strategy

• Define and champion a multi-year experience vision for ZIllow’s integrated financing customer journey, from pre-approval through close and beyond

• Identify strategic bets and investment priorities by connecting customer needs, operational constraints, and business outcomes

• Build the frameworks, narratives, and artifacts that help senior leaders make better experience decisions

• Translate enterprise strategy into actionable design direction for product teams

Lead Service Design

• Execute against an experience strategy by working closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Data Science, Sales Enablement, and Operations to deliver service improvements

• Audit an existing service via the creation of service design artifacts (journey maps, service blueprints, storyboards, multi-channel prototypes etc.) and lead design sessions and design critiques to co-create and iterate with partners

• Envision and create net new services and channels, driving innovation that fulfills larger business objectives

• Orchestrate the delivery of service improvements that cross channels and lines of business. Work through organizational silos to coordinate efforts and help others achieve better results

• Work with product designers, product managers, researchers, operations, content designers, loan officers, sales enablement, and engineers

• Build and implement agentic AI capabilities, specifically as it relates to service design work such as creating operating standards.

• Lead multiple projects independently and deliver high-quality work on time

• Mentor other designers & product managers, raise the quality and consistency of service design work, and explore how AI-enabled tools and workflows can strengthen service design practices

This role has been categorized as a Remote position. “Remote” employees do not have a permanent corporate office workplace and, instead, work from a physical location of their choice, which must be identified to the Company. U.S. employees may live in any of the 50 United States, with limited exceptions.

In California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $178,300.00 - $284,700.00 annually. This base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations. In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont the standard base pay range for this role is $169,300.00 - $270,500.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.

In addition to a competitive base salary this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location. Employees in this role will not be paid below the salary threshold for exempt employees in the state where they reside.

Who you are

• 7+ years of experience in service design, design strategy, business design, product design, user experience design, or a related field

• Proven ability to operate at multiple levels, from executive storytelling and strategic framing to detailed design critique and d