Senior Engineering Manager - 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 Engineering Manager for the new India-based Delivery Engineering team, you'll build and lead a founding, general-purpose platform team responsible for high-impact work across CI/CD and build infrastructure, Progressive Delivery, migration and deprecation programs, GitLab/Artifactory operations, and mobile release/build tooling.

You'll own hiring, people management, performance, and career development while bringing enough technical depth to earn credibility, engage in design reviews, and represent India-owned areas in engineering leadership forums. This is a founding leadership role : the standards you set and the first engineers you hire will define the long-term success of Delivery Engineering in India.

What you'll do :

• Build and grow a high-impact founding team that owns platform, Progressive Delivery, migration, and mobile-release work as first-class contributors.

• Establish a follow-the-sun operating model with defined overlap, handoff practices, async-first documentation, and a phased India on-call rotation.

• Hire a senior founding team and set and hold a high hiring bar.

• Partner with US area leads and the TPM to allocate capacity, limit work in progress, reduce context switching, and drive predictable delivery.

• Raise the bar on operational excellence : on-call practices, incident response, post-incident reviews, SLOs, runbooks, and toil reduction.

• Champion AI-first delivery across the SDLC, including agentic migration, AI code review, rollout analysis, and platform operations.

• Create a healthy engineering culture across time zones with clear goals, feedback, performance management, development plans, and technical-leadership growth.

What you'll bring :

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams that build backend, platform, infrastructure, SRE, or developer-productivity services.

• Staff+ technical depth and sound judgment : able to align business goals with platform capabilities and guide architecture beyond the immediate team.

• Strong operating experience : production ownership, on-call, incident response, observability, runbooks, and improving reliability over time.

• A proven hiring and talent-development bar : able to recruit, assess, onboard, mentor, and manage performance with clarity and empathy.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication across seniority levels and geographies; comfortable with async-first decision-making.

• Demonstrated ability to build trust with distributed stakeholders and represent India engineering as a peer ownership function.

Preferred qualifications :

• Experience building or scaling a new site or distributed engineering team, especially across US - India.

• Experience in DevEx, platform, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, release engineering, or SRE organizations supporting many internal customers.

• Hands-on familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab, CI/CD runners, observability tooling, and modern incident management.

• Experience applying AI to engineering workflows with a quality, governance, and developer-trust mindset.