Principal Engineer - Platform Engineering

About the team

The Developer Experience (DevEx) Delivery Engineering team builds and operates Zillow's software delivery platform. This is the paved road from commit to production that every Zillow Group engineer relies on to build, test, deploy, and ship. The platform supports org-wide delivery infrastructure at meaningful scale: CI/CD, runners, GitLab, Artifactory, Progressive Delivery, mobile build and release, and legacy migration programs. We are shifting from hands-on infrastructure operations toward secure, compliant, AI-first paved paths that improve reliability, release safety, and developer productivity.

We are standing up a new India-based team to expand capacity, enable follow-the-sun coverage, and take first-class ownership of high-impact platform initiatives. As one of the founding members, you'll help shape a brand-new engineering site while working on infrastructure that multiplies the productivity of the entire engineering organization.

What the team works on

• GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo): operate the central source-control and CI/CD platform and enable secure, AI-assisted SDLC workflows.
• CI/CD runners: modernize Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android runner fleets improving isolation, queueing, and cost attribution.
• Progressive Delivery: scale canary, health-gated, rollback-aware deployment patterns.
• Artifactory and supply chain: operate a Tier-0 artifact platform and improve upgrade, backup, retention, and lifecycle practices.
• Migration and modernization: retire legacy CI/CD (Concrete) using dashboards, partner engagement, and agentic migration.
• Mobile build/release and Mobile DevOps: sustain a high release cadence while modernizing build tooling.

About the role

As the founding Principal Engineer for the India Delivery Engineering team, you'll be the technical anchor for a brand-new site and the most senior individual contributor on the team. You'll set the architecture for our most important platform systems, CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, and GitLab/Artifactory integrations. Drive standards that other teams adopt, and turn India's ownership into durable technical authority through design reviews, reliability practices, and real deliverables from day one.

This is a hands-on, high-leverage role for someone who wants to lead platform architecture and mentor a growing team while partnering closely with engineering leaders across geographies.

What you'll do

• Set the architecture for CI/CD execution, build and runner infrastructure, GitLab/Artifactory integrations, and the paved paths all Zillow engineers use.
• Drive patterns and standards that other teams adopt, acting as design authority for India-owned areas in partnership with senior engineers across the org.
• Take the most ambiguous components from problem framing to production-ready, observable, well-documented systems.
• Hire and mentor engineers, raise the quality of code and design reviews, and help set the team's engineering standards.
• Lead the safe adoption of AI across migration, code review, platform operations, incident triage, and rollout guidance.
• Shape on-call maturity, SLOs, incident response, runbooks, and reliability practices for the team's services.
• Write clear design docs and distill complex platform tradeoffs for engineers, managers, partner teams, and executives across geographies.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with extensive experience in large-scale CI/CD, build/runner infrastructure, cloud-native platform engineering, developer-productivity tooling, or SRE/platform systems.
• Deep system design and architecture judgment for scalable, reliable, maintainable systems, with strong testability, resilience, security, and observability practices.
• Technical leadership and influence without direct authority, with a proven ability to align multiple teams on standards and tradeoffs.
• Production ownership: incident response, on-call, operational debugging, capacity planning, and post-incident prevention.
• Strong programming fundamentals in Python, Java, Go, or similar; able to review code, debug systems, and reason about performance and concurrency.
• Hands-on or deep conceptual experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers, CI/CD platforms, and infrastructure as code.
• Exceptional written communication: design docs, strategy docs, decision records, rollout plans, and executive-ready tradeoff summaries.
• Comfort operating async-first across USIndia time zones and helping build a new engineering culture.