Senior Software Development Engineer, Big Data

Senior Software Development Engineer, Big Data

Join to apply for the Senior Software Development Engineer, Big Data role at Zillow

The Zillow Group’s Housing Trends Data Engineering team brings innovative analysis, creativity, and excellence to the U.S. housing market. We create, productionalize, analyze, and share a full collection of housing metrics and analysis for Zillow’s internal and external customers. Our work contextualizes Zillow’s unparalleled living database of all homes and hundreds of millions of customers to provide insight to everyday consumers and open data to hundreds of researchers and policymakers across the country.

You’ll work in a fun, collaborative atmosphere with a high-performance team with diverse data engineering and analytical skills. Your work will be highly impactful. The data we create ends up in the nation’s most reputable publications, used by government institutions in policy-making and official reports, in public-facing tools used by millions of Zillow consumers, and in the work of hundreds of academic researchers.

Small team = big impact. Engineering teams are highly decentralized in order to create the small team speed and autonomy of a start-up environment but are backed by big company resources.

We process hundreds of millions of data points to produce macroeconomic housing market indicators, forecasts, and insights. We publish those so businesses, policymakers, and individuals can make informed decisions about homes. We are also an integral part of housing market intelligence for our internal businesses, and an important input into tactical and strategic business decisions with customers across the company (from marketing, finance, business unit ML teams, to executives).

We are looking for a strong engineer who will be working closely with the data science and forecasting teams, and our customers to help us re-shape our rapidly‑evolving data products and the end‑to‑end data processing framework. You will have great opportunities to learn cutting‑edge ecosystems, cloud technologies, and work with a group of versatile software developers in a collaborative and supportive team environment.

This role has been categorized as a Remote position.

• Strong proficiency in Python programming
• Hands‑on experience with big data ecosystems, architectures and modern data platforms, including AWS cloud data services and Lakehouse/Lakebase platforms
• Hands‑on experience with Databricks is a significant advantage.
• Proven ability to design, build, and orchestrate batch and real‑time data pipelines, processing large‑scale datasets from diverse sources
• Practical experience with cutting‑edge data engineering technologies such as Spark
  
  SQL and Spark Streaming, Postgre
  
  SQL, EKS, and Kubernetes
• Familiarity with Agile/Dev Ops software development processes and tools such as Git Lab and CI/CD.
• A good understanding of data science concepts, fundamental machine learning algorithms/libraries, and development lifecycle is a must‑to‑have.
• Familiarity with LLM and Agentic AI technologies and engineering patterns is a big advantage.
• Strong ability in performing root cause analysis to address operational issues and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Exceptional communication skills to drive effective customer engagement, collaborate with cross‑functional teams, and clearly articulate technical concepts to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and the ability to work in a fast‑paced, collaborative environment.
• 5+ years of experience in Big Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering roles.

• Build data systems to link raw data and concrete Housing Trends insights.
• Build and extend our internal forecasting model development framework.
• Develop and maintain scalable data products and deliver pipelines built for speed, accuracy, and consistency that will scale as our stakeholders’ need.
• Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery, re‑designing infrastructure for greater scalability and performance, etc.
• Collaborate with data scientists to…