Senior Research Technologist

About the team

As Senior Research Technologist, you’ll sit within the Product Acceleration Research team, a sub-team of Zillow Research & Insights (ZRI) focused on accelerating the speed of product development. Specifically, you'll join the Emerging Opportunities team, whose mandate is to prove new capabilities, partnering closely with Design, Research Operations, and product teams across Zillow.

About the role

As Zillow's agentic AI experiences grow across every product surface, ZRI is expanding its team to include a new kind of role: a Research Technologist who sits at the intersection of technical fluency and research thinking.

You'll own the infrastructure that enables product teams, designers, and researchers to test AI-powered experiences with real users before they reach production, partnering across Product, Engineering, Design, and Research to build toward a faster, repeatable pre-production testing process across the org. You're motivated by building systems that raise the bar for how Zillow learns before it ships.

You will get to:

• Build, improve, and scale the infrastructure teams use to test emerging AI-powered experiences with real users before launch.

• Treat testing infrastructure like a product by prototyping quickly, learning from real use, and iterating based on what works.

• Define clear standards for when and how pre-production testing should happen, what evidence should inform decisions, and how those practices can scale across teams. Build the processes and systems that make these standards repeatable. 

• Partner with Product, Engineering, Design, Design Technology, and Research to translate testing needs into practical systems and workflows.

• Bring technical perspective into research conversations and advocate for strong learning practices in cross-functional decision-making.

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 $148,600.00 - $237,400.00 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 $141,200.00 - $225,600.00 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

You're a builder first, regardless of your background. You're energized by jumping into a messy system, understanding how it actually works, and turning ambiguous problems into scalable workflows or tools. 

• You are a builder who enjoys turning ambiguous, manual, or fragmented processes into practical tools, workflows, or systems that scale.

• You have the technical fluency to partner effectively with engineers and understand how AI-enabled systems are built, tested, and improved.

• You bring strong research judgment and understand what makes user testing and experimentation credible, useful, and actionable.

• You collaborate well across Product, Engineering, Design, Research, and hybrid disciplines that blur these lines, and you can move work forward in a complex organization.

• You are comfortable with ambiguity and can help define a path forward when the problem, process, or solution is still taking shape.

• Here at Zillow - we value the experience and perspective of candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. We encourage you to apply if you have transferable skills or related experiences.

Nice to Have

• Scripting or lightweight coding - you've written Python, JavaScript, or similar to automate something or solve a problem, even if you don't write production code regularly

• API fluency - you've called, configured, or debugged an API directly