Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

About the team

Zillow’s Reliability Engineering Organization, Consolidation and Advancement of Platform Engineering (CAPE), is dedicated to ensuring the reliability, availability, scalability, security, and performance of our systems. By fostering collaboration, innovation, and a steadfast focus on improving the customer experience, CAPE empowers teams to build exceptional, resilient products with efficiency and confidence!

About the role

As the Senior Manager, Platform Engineering, you’ll manage senior engineers, drive clarity and accountability across ambiguous spaces, and partner deeply with org leaders to align technical outcomes to business priorities. You’ll be expected to bring rigor to performance management, define and communicate value signals, and help shape the culture of technical excellence. This is not a traditional SRE or DevOps role. We are shifting toward platform engineering as enablement, not dependency. Your success is measured not by firefighting or ticket queues, but by your team’s ability to reduce KTLO, increase engineering velocity, and up-level ownership across other teams.

As a Senior Manager, Platform Engineering, you will:

• Lead and grow a team of engineers supporting shared services that abstract complexity, reduce redundancy, and standardize operational capabilities across the org.

• Own the performance and development of your team—ensuring clarity of expectations, consistent feedback loops, and an inclusive culture that challenges and supports.

• Partner with leaders across engineering, security, infrastructure, and product to align roadmaps, and communicate impact.

• Define clear signals of value and measure success through reliability, adoption, cost efficiency, and developer satisfaction.

• Drive modernization efforts across a portfolio of legacy services by empowering teams to adopt platform-first, self-service models.

• Shape the enablement strategy, helping teams shift from support reliance to platform-empowered ownership.

• Coach senior ICs and help them grow as technical and cultural leaders within and beyond your team.

• Bring strong written and verbal communication skills to influence across levels—equally comfortable in exec reviews and architecture forums.

• Promote a culture of accountability, high standards, and continuous improvement.

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, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $201,700.00 - $322,300.00 Annually. This base pay range is specific to California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC 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.

Who you are

• Proven success managing senior engineers and driving cross-cutting platform or enablement initiatives.

• Deep understanding of platform engineering principles, service architecture, and operational maturity models.

• A performance-oriented mindset—you know how to assess, develop, and motivate high-level technical talent.

• Ability to distill ambiguity into aligned roadmaps and clear team goals.

• Strong communication skills with demonstrated ability to engage executives, influence peers, and drive consensus.

• Passion for enablement, modernization, and systems that scale through culture, not headcount.

• Familiarity with distributed systems, observability, deployment frameworks, or platform adoption strategies is a plus.

Get to know us

Zillow is reimagining real estate to make home a reality for more and more people.

As the most-visited real estate website in the United States, Zillow® and its affiliates help movers find and win their home through digital solutions, first class partners, and easier buying, selling, financing and renting experiences. Millions of people visit Zillow Group sites every month to start their home search, and now they can rely on Zillow to help make it easier to move. The work we do helps people get home and no matt