Senior Systems Engineer

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. You will use Infrastructure as Code, deep Kubernetes expertise, and strong cloud networking fundamentals to design and operate systems across GCP and AWS. You’ll 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.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

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 (e.g., ALB/ALB controller, CloudFront, GCP load balancers, WAF/Cloud Armor); Kubernetes: Deep experience running Kubernetes in production (e.g., GKE, EKS), including cluster upgrades, workload configuration with ArgoCD / Helm, and incident debugging

Nice to have

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

Benefits

competitive base salary and benefits; eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location