Principal Product Technologist

About the team

The Product Development Transformation team is building something genuinely new at Zillow. We’re a small, mission-driven team charged with evolving how Zillow develops products: bringing experimentation earlier into the process, creating a shared language for learning and discovery, and shifting the culture toward a passion for building and creating in the age of AI.
We believe in doing before theorizing. We prototype our own processes. We run experiments on our own workflows. We use AI as a democratizing force that turns every team member into a builder, regardless of role. We’re here to make that real, and we’re looking for someone who wants to help build the engine that makes it go.

About the role

As a Principal Product Technologist on the Product Development Transformation team, you are the technical heartbeat of the team’s ability to build, learn, and scale. You’ll design and develop AI-powered tools and capabilities that help Zillow’s product teams discover knowledge, run structured experiments, and make better decisions faster, starting with our Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) and expanding from there. You will work cross-functionally to help instrument the tools to tell us whether the transformation is actually working, turning operational signals into organizational insight.

This is a role where the intersection of disciplines is the job. You bring engineering depth and product instincts. You’re energized by ambiguity, not paralyzed by it. You love building something real, putting it in front of real people, and learning from what happens next. You understand that the magic of a truly transformative system isn’t just in the idea. It’s in the hard, unglamorous work of bringing it all the way to life.

You Will Get To

• Build and iterate on AI-powered tools and capabilities that help Zillow’s product teams learn faster, decide better, and do more meaningful work

• Rapidly prototype solutions that compress key stages of the product development cycle, getting real learning into teams’ hands sooner

• Collaborate deeply with data science and engineering to bring new capabilities to life at scale, contributing to the architectural patterns, data pipelines, and integration standards that make the work sustainable

• Partner closely with product managers, researchers, and senior leadership to translate ambitious transformation goals into working, real-world systems

• Influence the technical architecture for AI-powered systems designed to scale across teams, organizations, and use cases

• Present work to partners and senior leadership with clarity and energy; make complex systems feel accessible and transformative outcomes feel real

• Lead projects independently, bringing structure to ambiguous problems and delivering high-quality outcomes with urgency and care

• Contribute, learn, grow, and help shape what this team becomes

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, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia 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

• Strong communication, influence, and collaboration skills; you can make the complex feel human

• 7–10 years of experience in software engineering, technical product development, or an adjacent discipline with meaningful depth

• Deep experience designing and building AI-powered systems, including agentic architectures, LLM orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool integration p