Principal Software Development Engineer, Rich Media

About the team

The Rich Media AI group aims to reinvent the real estate buying and renting experience, where every mover can get an immersive and deep sense of a home online and reimagine it as their own. We are inventing technologies that allow people to feel like they’re already there - all from their phone or desktop. Using cutting-edge computer vision and AI science, we work across disciplines to build products like 360 tours, floor plans, aerial overviews, and new experiences not even imagined yet! Combined, we are creating the next chapter of home shopping experiences. As a Principal Software Development Engineer within Rich Media’s Home Capture team (residing within Zillow’s AI organization), you'll be well-positioned as an engineer focused on building and improving how Zillow Group captures and ingests Rich Media into our backend systems.

About the role

As a Principal Software Development Engineer, you will play a pivotal role within Rich Media’s mission that enables large forward-looking work that unlocks wins across multiple teams. Home Capture team is the first stop along the pathway to better and more innovative experiences, providing real estate photographers and related systems the infrastructure and solutions they need to best capture the data required to connect and build these experiences. 

In this role, you will oversee larger-scoped projects that span across teams and partner orgs. Your most significant impact will stem from your ability to foresee future problems and orchestrate solutions, strategize across teams, and lead technical projects that span multiple teams/orgs in addition to your coding contributions.

You Will Get To:

• Foresee technical problems that the teams are not yet facing and propose corrective actions

• Innovate new solutions that balance implementation time, quality, observability, scalability, and maintainability.

• Strategize future solutions that enable Rich Media solutions to efficiently scale

• Lead technical service solutions spanning multiple teams

• Mentor engineers within and outside the team

• Oversee key performance indicators and ensure proper visibility

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 $191,300.00 - $305,700.00 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 $181,800.00 - $290,400.00 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 backend engineering experience

• Proactively collaborates across teams to communicate strategy and decisions

• Communication at technical, product strategy, and leadership levels

• Experience in creating technical software architecture designs

• Experience balancing delivering quality code with delivering experiences on a deadline

• Mentors senior engineers to develop independent technical leadership

• Defines and evolves platform-wide architectural standards, paved-road libraries, and testing/monitoring practices to ensure scalability and maintainability.

• Always seeking opportunities to identify and improve inefficiencies in existing systems 

• Experience with cloud services (AWS Preferred)

• Champion quality and stability of services

• Knowledgeable of the software development lifecycle including code reviews testing, and operations

• Excels at driving large fea