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# Principal Product Manager, Platform Engineering

- **Company:** ZINC Zillow
- **Location:** Los Angeles County, CA, United States (Remote available)
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $178,300.0 - $284,700.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Databases, Continuous Integration, Data Infrastructure, Programming Tools, Distributed Systems, Network Connections, Agentic-AI, Kubernetes
- **Published:** October 27, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/principal-product-manager-platform-engineering--e0097fa8-3318-4c00-9394-26bbaecc44d7

## About the Role

Product Management, Application Programming Interface (API), Machine Tool, Network Connectivity, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Strategy, Product Management, Metrics, Establish Priorities, * 8+ years of product management experience, including substantial time building internal platforms, infrastructure, or developer tooling used by multiple teams across organizational boundaries

 * Experience owning a platform portfolio rather than a single product area - multiple interdependent capabilities with different customers, maturity levels, and lifecycles - and prioritizing across them
 * Strong technical fluency in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, including compute and container orchestration, networking, databases, identity and secrets, and CI/CD, sufficient to reason about architectural tradeoffs alongside senior engineers rather than gather requirements from them
 * Proven track record driving adoption of platform standards across teams you do not manage, using defaults, deprecation paths, and mechanisms that drove measurable change in behavior
 * Experience leading complex migrations at scale, including the full retirement of the systems they replaced
 * Able to operate in ambiguity and impose structure on complex, cross-functional infrastructure initiatives where scope is undefined and precedent is limited
 * Experience raising the product bar for engineering leaders who carry product responsibility, through coaching, shared standards, and durable artifacts rather than sole ownership
 * Familiarity with designing platform capabilities for AI agents as consumers, including where automated workflows require human approval and how automated paths are verified
 * Clear, structured communicator who can hold a coherent platform narrative across engineering, adjacent platform teams, and executive stakeholders
 * Here at Zillow, we value the experience and perspective of candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. We encourage you to apply if you have transferable skills or related experiences.

## Description

As a Principal Product Manager for Platform Engineering, you will own product strategy for the platform capabilities that every engineering team at Zillow depends on. You will define the golden paths teams follow by default, drive adoption and migration onto those paths across thousands of services, and establish the measurement and value model that makes the platform's impact visible to the business.

This is the first dedicated product role in the organization. Platform Engineering has already built many of the foundations of a product operating model - customer discovery, written product requirements, and outcome metrics are how these teams work today - with engineering leaders carrying that work alongside running their teams. As a Principal Product Manager, you will raise the ceiling on that practice, partnering with engineering leadership across six teams to deepen discovery, sharpen prioritization, and organize the roadmap around customer problems and value streams rather than infrastructure layers.

Your scope spans the full platform surface - though the areas you drive most directly will be shaped by where the leverage is greatest as near-term product needs across the teams stabilize. At this level, you will define the operating model other teams plan and build within, not just execute within it yourself.

You Will Get To

 * Own platform strategy across Platform Engineering's portfolio, turning independently run infrastructure roadmaps into a coherent product direction with explicit investment tradeoffs
 * Define the golden paths for how engineers build at Zillow, designing the platform so the supported path is the fastest one and unsupported patterns are difficult to fall into
 * Drive adoption and migration outcomes across teams with no reporting relationship to you, using defaults, deprecation paths, and enablement mechanisms that produce measurable change in how teams build
 * Define how applications and AI agents consume platform capabilities, establishing which self-service paths are agent-driven, which remain deterministic, and where human approval is required
 * Establish how platform success is measured - adoption, onboarding time, satisfaction, and key customer outcomes - and build the underlying value model of what capabilities cost to serve and what they are worth
 * Deepen the product operating model across six engineering teams, partnering with the engineering leaders who carry product responsibility to strengthen discovery, requirements, and outcome definition
 * Partner closely with Data Platform, Developer Experience, and Security teams to keep the internal developer experience coherent and resolve ownership gaps between organizations