Principal Software Development Engineer

About the role

Developer Experience (DevEx) Delivery Engineering team builds Zillow's software delivery platform that powers CI/CD, runners, GitLab, and Artifactory for all engineers. As the founding Principal Engineer for the new India site, you will define architecture, drive standards, and mentor engineers while collaborating with global leaders. Bengaluru office, on-site work model, with opportunity to shape a new engineering culture and influence AI‑first platform initiatives.

What you’ll do

• Set architecture for CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, and GitLab/Artifactory integrations
• Drive platform standards adopted across Zillow engineering teams
• Transform ambiguous components into production‑ready, observable systems
• Hire, mentor, and raise engineering quality through design reviews
• Lead AI adoption in migration, code review, and platform operations
• Define on‑call maturity, SLOs, incident response, and reliability practices
• Produce clear design docs and communicate tradeoffs to engineers, managers, and executives

What you’ll bring

• 10+ years software engineering experience in large‑scale CI/CD or platform systems
• Deep system design and architecture judgment for scalable, reliable services
• Technical leadership influencing multiple teams without direct authority
• Production ownership including incident response and on‑call duties
• Strong programming in Python, Java, Go or similar
• Hands‑on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and containers
• Excellent written communication for design and strategy documents
• Comfort operating async‑first across US‑India time zones

Skills