Senior Manager, Software Engineering

About the team

The Guardians team owns Zillow’s Centralized Leads Platform (CLP), which handles lead ingestion, processing, and routing for buy, sell, and finance journeys across the company. The team’s services sit in the critical path between consumer experiences and professionals, powering pre‑connection and post‑connection workflows, as well as downstream analytics and finance data products. Guardians is also accountable for observability and operational excellence for this platform: improving transparency, ensuring system and resource health, reducing friction in onboarding new use cases, and driving continuous improvement in reliability, security, and efficiency.

About the role

As the Senior Engineering Manager for Guardians, you will lead a team of ~8 engineers responsible for the reliability, evolution, and adoption of Zillow’s centralized leads platform. You will own key initiatives such as the migration from legacy systems to modern workflows, expansion of capabilities that support agents and loan officers, integrations with partner funnels, and the observability roadmap that helps teams understand and operate the leads ecosystem with confidence. This role is ideal for a leader who enjoys combining deep technical systems thinking with hands-on people leadership and cross‑organizational influence to improve both customer experiences and internal developer productivity.

You Will Get To:

• Lead and grow a high‑impact engineering team (~8 engineers) that builds and runs the backend services that take in customer inquiries and match them with the right real estate professionals and loan officers across phone, text, and CRM tools.

• Modernize a mission‑critical platform, replacing legacy systems with more reliable, observable workflows so that lead processing is resilient, auditable, and easy to reason about for engineers and stakeholders.

• Design end‑to‑end lead journeys in partnership with product, operations, and analytics — from the moment a consumer raises their hand through to hand‑off into partner systems — reducing friction and improving conversion for buy, sell, and finance customers.

• Shape and execute the reliability and observability strategy, defining the roadmap, metrics, dashboards, and alerts that give teams fast, self‑service insight into system health and incidents.

• Use data and AI‑powered insights to improve routing and lead quality, working with analytics and finance partners to define the signals and data products that help prioritize the right customers at the right time.

• Raise the bar on operational excellence, including on‑call practices, incident response, post‑incident reviews, and runbooks, while continually reducing toil and improving the on‑call experience for engineers and partner teams.

• Set clear goals, development plans, and performance expectations for each engineer, grow technical leaders within the team, and manage performance with clarity, empathy, and accountability.

• Collaborate with peer engineering and product leaders across marketplace, CRM, contact center, and mortgage experiences to align APIs, contracts, and shared roadmaps around a cohesive long‑term vision for the leads platform.

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 $206,700.00 - $330,300.00 annually. This 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

• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing software engineering teams building backend or platform services, with direct responsibility for people leadership and regular software delivery to production.

• Technical leadership: Proven ability to understand business ambitions and align them with technical system capabilities, identifying gaps, navigating trade‑offs