Principal Portfolio Manager, Enterprise

Zillow Zillow · Consumer · United States · Remote

This role is for a Principal Portfolio Manager focused on Zillow's enterprise foundations, including data and AI platforms. The role involves portfolio-level prioritization, coherence, and decision support across shared platforms, ensuring investments align with company strategy and balance modernization, reliability, scalability, and innovation. It requires strong technical fluency and the ability to translate technical complexity into executive narratives, but does not involve technical architecture or delivery execution.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the enterprise portfolio narrative across shared identity, infrastructure, data/AI, and design foundations.
  2. Maintain a multi-year enterprise portfolio outlook that reflects modernization needs, lifecycle management, scalability goals, and cross-platform sequencing.
  3. Partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Finance, and Strategy leaders to evaluate and prioritize foundational investments.
  4. Make trade-offs explicit — balancing reliability, innovation, technical debt reduction, cost, and business enablement.
  5. Provide visibility into cross-platform dependencies, systemic risks, and architectural sequencing constraints.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of experience in portfolio management, product operations, technology strategy, enterprise platforms, or related roles.
  • Experience operating across large-scale, multi-team platform or infrastructure environments.
  • Strong technical fluency — able to understand architectural concepts, platform modernization, data ecosystems, and engineering trade-offs without acting as the architect.
  • Proven ability to operate at enterprise portfolio altitude, connecting multi-year strategy, funding decisions, and execution realities.
  • Demonstrated experience balancing innovation investments with reliability, scalability, and technical debt reduction.
  • Exceptional systems thinker who sees cross-platform interdependencies and second-order impacts.
  • Experience influencing senior engineering and executive leaders in complex, matrixed organizations.
  • Strong executive communication skills, able to synthesize technical complexity into clear, business-aligned decision narratives.
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguity and shaping clarity where none exists.
  • Experience supporting prioritization and investment decisions with senior technical and executive leaders.
  • Highly effective influencing without authority in matrixed organizations.
  • Strong executive communication skills, translating technical complexity into business-aligned decision narratives.
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguity and shaping clarity across technical domains.

What the JD emphasized

  • enterprise portfolio altitude
  • cross-platform dependencies
  • technical portfolio complexity
  • senior technical and executive leaders