You will design and build the highly scalable, robust foundational infrastructure that empowers our AI teams. We need a "roll-up-your-sleeves" technical leader who thrives in ambiguity, holds a high bar for production engineering, and possesses the ability to align multiple teams around a shared technical vision.About the role
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Agentic Data Foundations team, you will:
Architect and Build: Lead the design, prototyping, and deployment of scalable machine learning infrastructure that can power Zillow AI Mode.
Bridge and Partner: Serve as a critical technical liaison between the Agentic Data Platform and applied AI teams. You will collaborate closely with scientists, engineers, and product partners to understand their dependencies and deliver the data foundations they need to innovate rapidly.
Influence and Align: Act as a technical anchor for the team. You will drive alignment on timelines, architectures, and prioritization across different organizations, successfully influencing technical direction without requiring direct authority.
Scale for Impact: Deploy and optimize capabilities in production environments, ensuring high availability, low latency, and efficient resource utilization capable of handling massive scale.
Mentor and Elevate: Foster a culture of rapid innovation, frugality, and engineering excellence. You will mentor other engineers, guiding them in using the right technologies and establishing best practices.
Distill Complexity: Translate complex ML infrastructure designs and ambiguous customer problems into clear, actionable insights for diverse audiences, including leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
You are a seasoned engineer who seamlessly marries state-of-the-art machine learning paradigms (LLMs, Agentic frameworks) with large-scale data engineering. You love the architectural tension of a rapidly evolving space, expertly balancing the need to ship adaptable, high-value capabilities for immediate learning against the long-term vision of scale, all without falling into the trap of premature platform building. You are a natural relationship-builder who earns trust quickly, operates with a growth mindset, and knows how to lead initiatives from the whiteboard to production.
Our ideal candidate meets the following requirements:
Experience: 6+ years of hands-on expertise building, scaling, and operating large scale data and ML infrastructure, including production-grade pipelines, feature stores, model-serving layers or end-to-end ML systems.
Foundational ML & AI Expertise: Deep understanding of Machine Learning fundamentals and the production systems they require — data flows, serving infrastructure, observability, and evaluation. Familiarity with agentic patterns including orchestration, tool use, skill-based architectures, memory, and retrieval strategies (embeddings, hybrid search, ranking)
Technical Stack: Proficiency with agentic AI frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, Agents SDK), large-scale data processing (Spark, Databricks, Airflow), cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and vector stores. Python required.
Leadership & Influence: Proven ability to build strong cross-functional relationships. You excel at leading collaborative efforts, creating buy-in for your architectural vision, and driving execution across matrixed teams.
Exceptional Communicator: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with a track record of clearly articulating technical trade-offs to both engineering peers and executive leadership.
Engineering Rigor: Deep understanding of software design patterns, distributed systems architecture, and operational excellence (CI/CD, monitoring, A/B testing).
Agility: Comfort operating in a fast-paced, sometimes ambiguous "startup-like" environment within a larger enterprise, embracing a "build, learn, and pivot" mentality.
Nice to have:
Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
Experience building foundational infrastructure for agentic systems or real-time AI applications.
Experience with regulated, private, or sensitive data at scale.
At Zillow, we’re reimagining how people move—through the real estate market and through their careers. As the most-visited real estate platform in the U.S., we help customers navigate buying, selling, financing and renting with greater ease and confidence. Whether you're working in tech, sales, operations, or design, you’ll be part of a company that's reshaping an industry and helping more people make home a reality.
Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the country. Zillow was named one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® in 2025, and included on the PEOPLE Companies That Care® 2025 list, reflecting our commitment to creating an innovative, inclusive, and engaging culture where employees are empowered to grow.
No matter where you sit in the organization, your work will help drive innovation, support our customers, and move the industry—and your career—forward, together.
Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact your recruiter directly.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable state and local law.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Skills Required
- 6+ years of hands-on expertise building, scaling, and operating large scale data and ML infrastructure
- Deep understanding of Machine Learning fundamentals and the production systems they require
- Proficiency with agentic AI frameworks, large-scale data processing, cloud platforms, and Python
- Proven ability to build strong cross-functional relationships
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Deep understanding of software design patterns and distributed systems architecture
Zillow Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Zillow and has not been reviewed or approved by Zillow.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is described as comprehensive, spanning medical, dental, vision, and robust mental-health resources with coaching and app-based support. Wellness reimbursements and wellbeing tools reinforce a strong emphasis on overall health.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental benefits are noted as fully paid and expansive, including bonding leave, ramp-back options, and a new-baby stipend. Additional family-forming support such as fertility coverage, adoption/surrogacy assistance, breast milk shipping, and backup childcare deepens this strength.
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Flexible Benefits — A distributed-first work model offers broad location flexibility, with home-office support and short-term international work options. This flexibility pairs with generous PTO, holidays, sick leave, and a sabbatical program as key parts of the total package.
Zillow Insights
What We Do
Join our mission to give the people power to unlock life’s next chapter. Our homes are the heartbeat of our lives, and we believe that finding a home shouldn’t be so hard in today’s always-on world. That’s why we’re reimagining the traditional rules of real estate to make it easier than ever to move from one home to the next. Our journey began nearly 15 years ago with a handful of employees and one big idea: to make it radically easier for people to move. We began by helping people understand and track their homes with the Zestimate, our proprietary algorithm, and then with advanced technology and valuable connections with real estate professionals. Today, Zillow has become a household name. People are more likely to search for “Zillow” than “real estate,” and our name is often used as a verb. While other industries have ushered in a new era of convenience, the time for seamless and convenient real estate experience is now. This is our next chapter as a company. We’re looking for smart, passionate adventurers to join us as we reimagine the real estate transaction and change the way people buy, sell, rent and finance their homes.
