Senior Engineering Manager

Role Overview

As a Senior Engineering Manager on Zillow’s Database Platform Engineering team, you will modernize and scale the function into a platform engineering organization. You will set the technical strategy and operating model, grow engineering talent, and partner across product, analytics, AI, and security to deliver reliable, self-service “paved roads” for relational and NoSQL data workloads.

Responsibilities

• Evolve the team from reactive operations to modern platform engineering (self-service, automation-first capabilities).
• Deliver paved roads: tools, APIs, and golden paths that developers can trust.
• Drive measurable improvements in developer experience, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Reduce manual work and cross-team handoffs through modern tooling and AI-assisted workflows.
• Partner with product engineering, analytics, AI, and security to embed guardrails and adoption-friendly standards.
• Lead people and raise the bar on modern AI-assisted SDLC practices.

Requirements

• 5+ years of people leadership experience.
• Experience modernizing data infrastructure/data platform teams from reactive operations to proactive platform engineering.
• Strong background in data infrastructure platforms, including:
  • RDBMS and NoSQL concepts
  • Analytics/data ecosystem understanding
• Public cloud experience with AWS and/or GCP.
• Strong bias toward automation, APIs, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Familiarity with modern engineering stacks such as Python and/or Go (Golang).
• Interest in using AI tools to improve leverage via automation, better diagnostics, and faster delivery.
• High ownership, low ego, can-do attitude, and continuous learning.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience leading a similar organizational shift from manual/reactive work to scalable systems.