Principal Software Development Engineer, Design Systems (Web)

About the team

Zillow Experience Design (ZxD) shapes how people discover, buy, sell, and rent homes. Within ZxD, Design Foundations creates and scales the systems, standards, and tools that help product teams build high-quality, consistent, and accessible experiences across Zillow.
Design Foundations brings together design systems, digital accessibility, brand and visual language, content standards, and the AI-enabled tools increasingly used by Product, Design, and Engineering teams to design and build products.
Zillow's design systems, known internally as Constellation, span Web, iOS, Android, and Email. They give teams the shared components, patterns, and guidance they need to build with greater consistency, accessibility, and efficiency.

About the role

We're hiring a Principal Software Development Engineer to be the technical owner of Constellation Web. You'll set the technical direction for how the system evolves and keep it a healthy, reliable foundation for more than 300 codebases across Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, and HotPads, ultimately shaping how millions of people experience these products.

Zillow is accelerating AI-native product development. Your work will shape how Constellation Web evolves to support AI-assisted development and AI-generated UI, while setting and upholding a high bar for quality, performance, and accessibility across every team that builds with it.

You'll partner closely with design systems designers and engineers for web, engineering leads for our iOS, Android, and Email design systems, Zillow's front-end platform team, and senior engineering leaders across Zillow.

In this role, you will

Set technical direction for Constellation Web

• Define and drive the technical vision for Constellation Web, from component architecture and styling to framework upgrades and future major releases.
• Make the consequential architecture decisions that shape how teams across Zillow build for the web, using evidence to bring clarity to complex trade-offs.
• Partner proactively with Zillow's front-end platform team to shape how both platforms evolve together particularly as AI changes front-end development.

Drive adoption and alignment across Zillow

• Align senior engineering leaders on foundational technical shifts that require changes across their teams, building buy-in through a clear narrative and shaping investment decisions.
• Guide how consuming teams adopt and upgrade Constellation Web across different tech stacks and app architectures.
• Build strong partnerships with design systems designers, product managers, engineers, and partner teams to influence initiatives early.

Set and uphold the engineering bar

• Own Constellation Web's performance end to end, diagnosing issues across complex pages built from many sub-apps and micro frontends and driving resolution with the right team.
• Own release safety, code quality, and accessibility standards across Constellation Web's published packages, contributing code where it creates the most leverage.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leadership across the team, so knowledge and quality never depend on any one person.

Evolve Constellation Web for AI-native development

• Define how Constellation Web is built and used with coding agents while holding the same quality bar, partnering with Constellation's design technologists.
• Shape how the system supports AI-generated and server-driven UI so generated experiences follow the same standards.

This role has been categorized as a Remote position. "Remote" employees 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. U.S. employees may live in any of the 50 United States, with limited exceptions.

In California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC the standard base pay range for this role is $195,600.00 - $312,400.00 annually. This base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia the standard base pay range for this role is $185,800.00 - $296,800.00 annually. The base pay range is specific to these locations and may not be applicable to other locations.

In addition to a competitive base salary this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location. Employees in this role will not be paid below the salary threshold for exempt employees in the state where they reside.

Who you are

• You have 8+ years of front-end engineering experience, including several years in platform engineering: architecting and championing the paved roads that multiply velocity for other engineering teams, from design systems to self-service tools and foundational infrastructure.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• You have expert-level React, TypeScript, and CSS architecture skills, including designing composable component APIs and working with build-time styling systems such as Panda CSS, vanilla-extract, StyleX, or Tailwind.
• You bring strong architectural judgment across the broader web stack, from build tooling and server rendering to the platform integrations that a wide variety of consuming applications depend on.
• You have led multi-phase migrations and major upgrades of a shared library across many consuming applications, backed by strong testing and release practices and careful judgment on compatibility.
• You have deep web performance expertise, including Core Web Vitals (especially INP), and can trace issues to their root cause across complex, multi-team applications.
• You have deep accessibility expertise at the component-contract level and build components that are accessible by default, from ARIA relationships and focus management to keyboard behavior and screen reader testing.
• You have strong AI fluency, use agentic coding tools with sound judgment, and set code standards that hold up whether code is written by people or AI agents.
• You are a recognized technical leader beyond your team: you spot opportunities before anyone asks, mentor senior engineers, and influence engineering, design, and product leaders through evidence, clear writing, and compelling technical narratives.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience building a headless component architecture (from scratch or on Radix Primitives, React Aria, Base UI, or Ark UI) or migrating a styling engine such as Panda CSS.
• Experience with micro-frontend architectures, server-side rendering and hydration, or Next.js applications.
• Experience evolving a design system across multiple brands with shared design tokens and theming.
• Experience extending a design system to support AI-generated or server-driven UI.

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 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 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.