Principal Design Technologist, AI Design Tools

Zillow Group, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Remote-USA

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Own the end-to-end AI design tooling ecosystem for Zillow Experience Design (ZxD), unifying scattered AI tools into a coherent, supported stack with clear governance and adoption pathways.
• Decide which AI design tools Zillow should invest in, partner with, or deprecate based on impact, scalability, and alignment with design system standards.
• Identify high-value AI workflows across early exploration, prototyping, and production code generation, prioritizing where Zillow must build proprietary tooling versus leverage vendor solutions.
• Partner with the Constellation team to expand MCP server coverage, improve retrieval accuracy, and integrate new AI capabilities into the design system infrastructure.
• Ship and maintain Constellation Skill bundles for Claude Code, Cursor, and/or Figma to embed Zillow’s design system, brand guidelines, and accessibility standards as first-class context in builders’ workflows.
• Author starter templates for Zillow’s highest-traffic surfaces to enable designers, product managers, and researchers to generate production-credible UIs without starting from blank prompts.
• Build and maintain an evaluation harness that automatically assesses AI-generated UI against Constellation’s standards for component usage, token conformance, accessibility, and visual fidelity.
• Treat Constellation’s documentation as a product for LLMs by collaborating with system teams to develop machine-readable metadata and a trust-level model defining what AI agents can modify unsupervised.
• Partner with design, research, content, and brand teams to integrate their assets—such as UI patterns, research synthesis, and brand guidelines—into the unified AI tooling workflow.
• Stand up lightweight evaluation patterns that other teams can adopt to ensure consistency and quality in their AI-generated outputs.
• Empower cross-functional teams to become builders of their own AI tooling by providing shared infrastructure and reducing duplication where feasible.
• Build an enablement layer—including office hours, paved-path documentation, example workflows, a champions network, and scheduled team events—to drive behavioral change and tool adoption.
• Track where designers encounter friction in AI workflows and use those failures to prioritize next steps in tool development and infrastructure investment.
• Serve as Zillow’s technical voice in company-wide conversations about AI design tools, representing ZxD’s needs and standards to engineering, product, and leadership teams.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly to both designers and engineers, translating design intent into engineering requirements and vice versa.
• Maintain strong front-end engineering proficiency, including the ability to open and review PRs in the design system codebase.
• Apply pragmatic judgment to AI capabilities, recognizing real wins, honestly naming limitations, and resisting both hype and skepticism.
• Influence senior leaders with data-driven insights and a clear point of view, driving alignment across design, engineering, and product.
• Build durable cross-functional partnerships with design, engineering, product, and research teams to co-own roadmaps and decisions.
• Track real-world usage and impact of shipped tools, prioritizing measurable behavioral change over vanity metrics.
• Represent Zillow’s design system and AI tooling externally through public work such as open-source contributions, conference talks, or published agent plugins.

🎯 Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant experience across design and front-end engineering, with meaningful depth in one or more areas
• Production experience shipping internal-facing tooling for designers or engineers that measurably changed team workflows (e.g., Figma plugin, MCP server, Skill/extension with documented adoption, component library with downstream consumers)
• Strong fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) and productive patterns including structured context, retrieval, agent skills, evals, and tool integration
• Strong front-end engineering depth, including ability to open PRs in real codebases, particularly the design system codebase
• Working knowledge of design systems: component libraries, tokens, primitives, accessibility, multi-brand or multi-surface theming
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical work to senior design and product leaders, including writing clear documentation, running technical reviews, and presenting to director-level audiences

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive base salary range of $169,300–$284,700 annually, depending on location
• Equity awards based on experience, performance, and location
• Eligibility for all standard Zillow Group employee benefits
• Remote work flexibility across all 50 U.S. states with limited exceptions
• Opportunity to shape company-wide AI design strategy and influence industry-leading tooling
• Inclusion in a recognized best workplace (Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2025 and PEOPLE Companies That Care® 2025)

Skills & Technologies

iOS

Android

Senior

Remote

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Zillow Group, Inc.

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About Zillow Group, Inc.

Zillow Group operates the largest digital real-estate marketplace in the United States, connecting buyers, sellers, renters, landlords and agents through websites and mobile apps. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Seattle, the company provides property listings, valuation estimates via its Zestimate algorithm, comparative market analytics, mortgage origination and title services, and iBuying through its Zillow Instant Offers program. Revenue is generated primarily from Premier Agent advertising, lead generation, and real-estate services. The platform covers more than 110 million U.S. homes and is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the ticker ZG.

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