Principal Software Development Engineer, Backend

About the teamZillow is the top real estate website in the U.S., where millions of people come for help with their move. The hardest parts happen after the fun of browsing online, and the full process may span months. We empower home buyers by connecting them to the best professionals and tools to complete their move with confidence and ease.The Post-Connect Engineering org owns the stretch of the journey that starts when a home buyer requests to tour a home and ends when their offer is under contract. It's all too easy for a buyer to be overwhelmed by the details and daunted by finding "the one" that fits the must-haves and the budget. Our job is to make touring and triaging homes easy to do with other people, so that buyers remain energized and able to actually move. Our systems manage appointments against real-world constraints, sustain rich conversations across disparate channels and apps, and convert a buyer's raw reactions to homes into actionable plans, with AI running throughout.About the roleYou will primarily support five engineering teams and their partners in Product and Data Science on matters technical and strategic. You solve customer, business, and technical problems without authority over any team; your influence comes from the quality of your judgment and the relationships you cultivate. You will lead and mentor engineers across the organization and act as a domain expert and ambassador across Zillow Group.You will be the primary technical steward of the backend of the Post-Connect domain; it spans multiple languages, third-party integrations, and a distributed architecture running in AWS. But we are first and foremost a product engineering team, with customers as our north star. You choose where your effort will have the most leverage. You will take on the problems that are too large or too ambiguous for a single team to absorb. The job requires self-direction with occasional top-down assignments: there is no backlog curated for you.Success looks