Senior Manager Site Reliability Engineering

About The Team

The FUB Infrastructure (i12e) team at Zillow owns the core platform powering Follow Up Boss. This includes application infrastructure across development, QA, and production AWS accounts, legacy partner development infrastructure, critical shared services, and observability, monitoring, and cost management for FUB workloads. The team also handles incident response, on-call duties, and developer experience tooling, including dev environments, onboarding, deployment, CI/CD, and automation. Furthermore, they manage the FUB security posture, including audits, compliance, app security, tooling, and policy in partnership with Zillow Group (ZG) security teams. This team collaborates closely with central Zillow platform organizations (database, networking, security, ZGCP/TE) and the broader Follow Up Boss product engineering organization to ensure the system is reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective, while also unblocking developer velocity.

About The Role

As a Senior Engineering Manager (M4) for FUB Infrastructure (SRE) at Zillow, you will lead a multidisciplinary team of SREs, SDEs, and security engineers. Your team will be responsible for the infrastructure, reliability, and developer experience that underpin Follow Up Boss. You will own team execution, quality, and innovation across multiple systems and workloads supporting the entire FUB+ organization. A key aspect of this role is to transition the infra team into a strong posture for proactive, roadmap-driven investments in reliability, scalability, security, and developer productivity. You will also drive cross-organizational alignment and strategy with ZG platform teams (ZGCP, SRE, networking, database, security) and FUB product teams to modernize FUB infrastructure and adopt shared platform capabilities. This is an M4 scope role, meaning you are expected to consistently deliver through others (including senior individual contributors who do not report to you), shape technical strategy beyond your immediate team, and operate with limited oversight.

Key Responsibilities (M4 Expectations + FUB Infra Needs)

Team Execution & Roadmap

• Own execution for the FUB infra & security roadmap, translating strategic goals into a sequenced, realistic plan with clear milestones and measures of success.
• Run an exemplary planning and delivery rhythm (quarterly), including estimation, risk management, dependency mapping, and stakeholder updates.
• Ensure the team meets commitments with rare surprises, proactively engaging partners to adjust scope, resources, or timeline when risks emerge.

Reliability, Quality & On-Call

• Be accountable for the reliability, performance, operability, and cost of core FUB services and infrastructure (EC2, RDS/Aurora, Redis/Valkey, networking, queues, SRE tooling).
• Lead the team to run a low-toil on-call process, focusing on well-defined SLOs, actionable alerting, fast incident detection/response, high-quality RCAs, and follow-through on remediation.
• Drive urgent, sustained progress on database scaling and performance, including capacity management, query and schema optimization, and modernization of data infrastructure.

Infrastructure Modernization & Platform Strategy

• Lead the FUB modernization strategy and execution for prioritized workloads, balancing developer experience (devex) wins, reliability, and risk while coordinating with central teams.
• Partner with principal/staff engineers to refine FUB’s service scaling strategy, providing clear guidance on build vs. buy decisions and how infrastructure supports these choices.

Developer Experience & Environments

• Raise the bar on developer environments and onboarding, reducing friction in dev boxes, tooling setup, and infra access to ensure new engineers are productive quickly with reliable, self-service workflows.
• Drive faster, safer deployments by improving CI/CD (GitLab, pipelines, AMI replacements, canary/progressive delivery) and aligning with ZG best practices for trunk-based development and feature flags.
• Partner with product SDMs and tech leads to lower operational friction for dev teams through better runbooks, improved observability, easier infra integrations, and automated guardrails.

Team Building, Coaching & Talent

• Lead and grow a high-performing, inclusive SRE/infrastructure/security team, setting clear expectations, providing candid feedback, and managing performance.
• Develop technical leaders within and adjacent to the team through sponsorship, delegation, and stretch opportunities.
• Hire, retain, and onboard talent across SRE, infra SDE, ensuring skills match the breadth of FUB infra (AWS, Terraform/Ansible, Kubernetes/ZGCP, observability, security, databases).

Cross-Org Alignment & Strategy

• Serve as the primary technical and operational interface for FUB infra with FUB+ leadership and central Zillow platform orgs, driving alignment on priorities, tradeoffs, and architectural decisions.
• Contribute materially to FUB+ tech vision and infra strategy, particularly around service scaling, platform adoption, and our long-term operations model.
• Help identify and resolve cross-org misalignment and advocate for solutions that maximize Zillow-wide value.

Innovation & AI

• Champion innovation that improves reliability, scalability, cost, and devex, including adoption of ZG-standard tooling and patterns and infra-focused AI agents.
• Normalize AI usage within the infra team (e.g., code generation, incident summarization, capacity modeling) and share successful patterns broadly.

Security, Compliance & Cost

• Partner with security teams to ensure infra and application environments meet audit, SOC2, SOX, privacy, and app-sec requirements, with clear ownership for remediation and sustainable controls.
• Forecast and manage runtime and infra costs, using tagging, dashboards, and guardrails to keep costs within budget while supporting growth.

Who You Are

• Proven track record as a Senior Engineering Manager or equivalent, leading SRE, platform, or infrastructure teams supporting high-availability SaaS products.
• Experience scaling production systems and databases in a cloud environment (ideally AWS) and leading meaningful improvements in reliability, performance, and cost.
• Demonstrated ability to shift a team from reactive to proactive roadmap-driven execution, including setting strategy, defining metrics, and driving sustained progress.
• Strong background in developer experience and CI/CD, with hands-on familiarity with tools such as Terraform/Ansible, GitLab, Kubernetes/ZGCP, and modern observability stacks.
• Experience partnering with security, database, networking, and central platform teams in a multi-org environment; able to navigate ambiguity and complex stakeholder landscapes.
• Demonstrated people leadership as a Senior Engineering Manager: managing senior engineers, handling performance issues with limited support, building inclusive culture, and developing leaders.
• Comfortable experimenting with and operationalizing AI tools in engineering workflows; curiosity and learning mindset around emerging platform and infra capabilities.
• SaaS / Sales CRM experience is a plus.
• Strong experience with scaling large LAMP / web applications.

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 customers 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. Zillow is honored to be recognized among the best workplaces in the country. Zillow was named one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® in 2025, and included on the PEOPLE Companies That Care® 2025 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. Key skills/competency: Senior Manager Site Reliability Engineering, AWS, Infrastructure, Reliability, Developer Experience, CI/CD, Security, Databases, Cloud Environments, AI Tools