Software Development Engineer, Backend (Go/Python)

About the team

The Senior Specialist, Software Engineering, Back End designs, builds, and operates scalable, reliable backend services and platforms that power Zillow’s consumer and partner experiences. This role leads complex server-side development, improves system performance and resiliency, and collaborates closely with product, data, and infrastructure teams to support millions of users and enable developer productivity across multiple brands.

About the role

• Design & Build Distributed Systems: Lead the design and implementation of scalable backend services and APIs. Strong proficiency in Go (preferred), TypeScript, Python, or Java, with the ability to ramp quickly on new technologies as needed.
• GraphQL Schema Ownership: Define, evolve, and maintain GraphQL schemas that power consumer-facing experiences across web and mobile platforms, ensuring consistency, performance, and clarity of data contracts.
• Data and Pipeline Engineering: Design and operate resilient data across asynchronous systems (e.g., Kafka or similar event streams), queues, and synchronous service APIs. Emphasize correctness, idempotency, fault tolerance, and throughput at scale.
• Product Ownership & Operational Excellence: Take full ownership of services in production, including on-call participation, proactive monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvements to reliability, latency, and scalability against defined service-level metrics.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product, UX, and engineering teams across the stack. Align with upstream and downstream dependencies, define clear service contracts, and make thoughtful trade-offs that balance product velocity with long-term technical durability.
• Technical Communication & Documentation: Author high-quality design documents and technical proposals. Communicate decisions and status clearly to unblock teams and drive alignment. Conduct rigorous code reviews within and across teams to uphold best-in-class code quality, maintainability, and system integrity.
• Quality & Sustainability: Champion effective testing strategies, targeted automation, and pragmatic engineering standards that scale beyond a single initiative.
• Customer Impact Focus: Deliver backend capabilities that elevate media experiences — including photos, video, and immersive tours — and drive measurable improvements in customer engagement and product performance.
• AI-Augmented Engineering Practice: Actively leverage modern AI development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, and similar assistants) to accelerate design, implementation, testing, and debugging. Continuously build fluency in AI-assisted workflows and apply them responsibly to improve engineering velocity, code quality, and learning speed across the team.

This role has been categorized as a teleworker position. Teleworkers do not have a permanent corporate office workplace and instead work from a physical location of their choice, which must be identified to the Company. Employees may live anywhere in Mexico, with availability to travel to Mexico City, as we recommend attendance at occasional office events.

In addition to a competitive base salary and benefits, this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location.

Who you are

• Experienced backend engineer. You have a BS/MS in Computer Science (or equivalent practical experience) and 5+ years building scalable backend services for consumer-facing products using Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and/or Java.
• Cloud-native and distributed systems practitioner. You have hands-on experience with Kubernetes, event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar), Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), and AWS or comparable cloud platforms.
• Systems-minded and pragmatic. You design reliable distributed systems and make sound trade-offs between speed and long-term durability.
• Strong technical owner. You take responsibility from design through production operations, continuously improving reliability, performance, and quality.
• High engineering bar. You write clean, maintainable code, provide rigorous code reviews, and elevate team standards.
• Clear communicator. You document decisions well, align cross-functional partners, and explain complex ideas simply.
• AI-forward and curious. You leverage modern AI tools to accelerate development and continuously improve your craft.
• Customer-focused. You are motivated by building backend systems that power visible, high-impact consumer experiences.

Get to know us

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 people 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.

How we work is a key part of that transformation. Through Cloud HQ, our strategic approach to distributed work, most employees have the flexibility to work from wherever they’re most productive—enabling us to move fast, stay connected and deliver on our people promise.

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 2026, and included on TIME’s America’s Best Companies 2026 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 committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment and to providing equal employment opportunities. We comply with applicable laws that prohibit discrimination in employment and recruitment.

If you have a disability or special need that requires reasonable accommodation during the recruitment process, please contact your recruiter directly.

Qualified applicants will be considered for employment based on their qualifications and ability to perform the functions of the position, without discrimination and in accordance with applicable 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.