Senior Manager, Software Engineering

📋 Description

• • Lead and grow a high-impact engineering team of approximately 8 engineers responsible for building and operating the backend services that manage customer inquiries and connect them with the appropriate real estate professionals and loan officers. This involves intricate workflows across phone, text, and CRM tools, placing you at the heart of Zillow's customer engagement.
• • Spearhead the modernization of a mission-critical platform, transitioning from legacy systems to more robust, observable, and resilient workflows. Your efforts will ensure that lead processing is not only dependable and auditable but also easily understandable for both engineers and stakeholders, significantly improving system maintainability and developer productivity.
• • Design and implement end-to-end lead journeys in close collaboration with product management, operations, and analytics teams. This encompasses the entire lifecycle from a consumer's initial inquiry to the final hand-off into partner systems, with the goal of reducing friction and enhancing conversion rates for buy, sell, and finance customers.
• • Define and execute the strategic roadmap for reliability and observability. This includes establishing key metrics, developing comprehensive dashboards, and implementing effective alerts that provide engineering teams with fast, self-service insights into system health, performance, and incident status.
• • Leverage data and AI-powered insights to optimize lead routing and improve overall lead quality. You will partner with analytics and finance teams to identify and define critical signals and data products that enable the prioritization of the right customers for the right professionals at the right time, driving business value.
• • Champion operational excellence across the team and platform. This involves refining on-call practices, enhancing incident response protocols, conducting thorough post-incident reviews, and developing comprehensive runbooks. A key focus will be on continuously reducing operational toil and improving the on-call experience for engineers and partner teams.
• • Establish clear, measurable goals, create tailored development plans, and set performance expectations for each engineer on your team. You will be instrumental in growing technical leaders from within the team, managing performance with a balance of clarity, empathy, and accountability.
• • Foster strong collaborative relationships with peer engineering and product leaders across various domains, including marketplace, CRM, contact center, and mortgage experiences. This collaboration is crucial for aligning APIs, defining service contracts, and harmonizing shared roadmaps to achieve a cohesive, long-term vision for Zillow's centralized leads platform.
• • Drive technical strategy and architectural decisions for the Guardians team, ensuring alignment with Zillow's broader engineering principles and business objectives. This includes evaluating new technologies, advocating for best practices, and ensuring the scalability and sustainability of the platform.
• • Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and psychological safety. Your leadership will empower the team to tackle complex challenges and deliver high-quality solutions.
• • Act as a key technical advisor and influencer, representing the Guardians team in cross-functional forums and contributing to Zillow's overall engineering strategy and technical direction.
• • Oversee the development and deployment lifecycle, ensuring adherence to best practices in software development, testing, and release management, while maintaining a high degree of quality and reliability.
• • Contribute to the strategic planning and budgeting for the Guardians team, aligning resource allocation with key initiatives and business priorities.
• • Ensure the platform adheres to all relevant security, compliance, and regulatory requirements, working closely with security and legal teams to mitigate risks and maintain Zillow's reputation.
• • Drive a culture of proactive problem-solving and continuous improvement, encouraging the team to identify potential issues before they impact users and to constantly seek ways to enhance system performance and efficiency.