Senior Systems Engineer

About the Team

As a Senior Systems Engineer within Zillow Rentals, you’ll help design, build, and operate the core infrastructure that powers the Zillow Rentals experience. Our team owns shared cloud platform infrastructure and cross‑cloud networking that supports more than 150 engineers across the Rentals organization. You’ll partner closely with backend, frontend, and data teams to provide secure, reliable, and scalable foundations for customer‑facing products.

In this role, you’ll be a hands‑on contributor to infrastructure and developer platforms. Use Infrastructure as Code, deep Kubernetes expertise, and strong cloud networking fundamentals to design and operate systems across GCP and AWS. Drive reliability and security, lead incident investigations, and collaborate across engineering teams to deliver resilient, observable, and cost‑effective infrastructure that enables rapid product delivery.

• Design, implement, and operate production infrastructure in GCP and/or AWS, supporting high‑scale, business‑critical services for Zillow Rentals.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (primarily with Terraform), including modules, state management, and reusable patterns for platform services.
• Own Kubernetes platforms (e.g., GKE/EKS): perform cluster upgrades, tune workloads, manage Terraform, ArgoCD/Helm‑based deployments, and debug complex production issues.
• Architect and secure cloud networking (VPCs, subnets, routing, load balancers, DNS, TLS, VPN, WAF) and ingress/egress patterns for internal and external traffic.

Improve observability and operations by defining metrics, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks that raise the bar for reliability and incident response.

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 addition to a competitive base salary and benefits, this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location.

• 4+ years of hands‑on experience designing, building, and operating production systems in GCP and/or AWS (at least one at depth, both strongly preferred)
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
  Experience with Terraform and IaC practices (modules, state management) for managing cloud infrastructure and platform services.
• Cloud networking:
  Proven experience with cloud networking (VPC design, subnets, routing, NAT, security groups/firewalls, load balancers, DNS, TLS, VPN) and securing ingress/egress paths.
• Kubernetes:
  Deep experience running Kubernetes in production (e.g., GKE, EKS), including cluster upgrades, workload configuration with ArgoCD / Helm, and incident debugging
• We value candidates with non‑traditional backgrounds and encourage you to apply if you have transferable skills or related experiences.

• Experience in database management and operations
• Provisioning with tools such as Ansible and Packer
• Programming experience with Java or Python

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.