Principal Software Development Engineer
Principal engineer leading the build-out of Zillow’s new India-based CI/CD and developer-platform infrastructure, setting standards for GitLab, runners, Artifactory, and Progressive Delivery used by every Zillow engineer.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Bengaluru
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 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/pla
- 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.
Full description
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.
Zillow Group is a strategic, mission-driven organization focused on delivering exceptional experiences and measurable outcomes. Our work spans cross-functional partnership, scalable programs and operational excellence in support of Zillow’s mission. We bring deep experience working across diverse teams in a dynamic, high-growth environment, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution to drive meaningful business impact. We are seeking an experienced professional to support our workforce expansion in India.
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.