Senior Engineering Manager, Software Engineering

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

10+ 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.

Why join

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.

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., Zillow helps millions of customers navigate buying, selling, financing, and renting with greater ease and confidence. Our teams in India play a critical role in building and scaling the technology, products, and operations that power this experience.

Whether you’re working in tech, operations, or shared services, you’ll collaborate with global partners to solve meaningful problems and help more people make home a reality.

Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the U.S.. 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, maternity status, HIV status, or veteran status. Reasonable accommodations will be provided to candidates with disabilities, in accordance with applicable policies.