Principal Software Development Engineer

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.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

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 US–India time zones and helping build a new engineering culture.

Nice to have

Depth in GitLab (including GitLab Dedicated and Duo), runner fleets, or Artifactory.; Experience with SaltStack, Ansible, Puppet, or comparable automation tooling.; Mobile build infrastructure experience (iOS or Android).; Prior experience applying AI in the software development lifecycle.; Experience founding or scaling a new site or distributed engineering team.

Benefits

Founding role: shape a new India engineering site and help set the technical and cultural bar from day one.; High leverage: work on the platform used by every Zillow engineer and every major product surface.; Modernization agenda: GitLab Dedicated, runner rearchitecture, Progressive Delivery, Artifactory modernization, and legacy retirement.; AI-first work: real production use cases across code review, migrations, incident analysis, and deployment safety.; Global collaboration: partner directly with US engineering leaders while building durable India ownership.; Competitive base pay; Incentive compensation