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 between short‑term and long‑term investments, and influencing architecture beyond your immediate team.
- Systems design & architecture: Deep experience designing and operating scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend or data systems, with an emphasis on testability, resiliency, and observability.
- Operational excellence: Strong track record running on‑call rotations, diagnosing and resolving critical production issues, improving observability and runbooks, and raising the bar on system health and operational rigor across teams.
- Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to distill complex technical topics for audiences ranging from junior engineers to executives, and to create clear, reasoned design and strategy documents.
- People leadership & mentorship: Demonstrated success building and developing engineering talent, including setting goals, providing regular feedback, mentoring senior and junior engineers, and managing performance issues with appropriate support and urgency.
- Problem solving & judgment: Ability to make high‑judgment decisions in complex, ambiguous environments, balancing near‑term deliverables with long‑term platform vision and health.
- 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.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience working on platform or infrastructure teams that support multiple product surfaces and internal customers, ideally in a large‑scale, high‑impact environment.
- Hands‑on experience with event‑driven or workflow‑orchestrated systems and integrating with many upstream and downstream services.
- Familiarity with observability tooling and practices (for example, Datadog, Splunk, metrics, logs, tracing) and using these signals to guide engineering investments and incident response.
- Experience with public cloud platforms and container orchestration (such as AWS and Kubernetes), and with building secure‑by‑default, compliant systems in partnership with security and risk teams.
- Prior exposure to marketplaces, lead routing, or CRM‑style systems, especially where experimentation, configuration, and routing quality have meaningful business impact.
Get to know us
At Zillow, we’re reimagining how people move—through the real estate market and through their careers. As the most-visited real estate platform in the U.S., we help customers navigate buying, selling, financing and renting with greater ease and confidence. Whether you're working in tech, sales, operations, or design, you’ll be part of a company that's reshaping an industry and helping more people make home a reality.
Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the country. Zillow was named one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® in 2025, and included on the PEOPLE Companies That Care® 2025list, reflecting our commitment to creating an innovative, inclusive, and engaging culture where employees are empowered to grow.
No matter where you sit in the organization, your work will help drive innovation, support our customers, and move the industry—and your career—forward, together.
Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact your recruiter directly.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable state and local law.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.