Principal Product Designer, Mover Experience

About the team Zillow’s Mover Experience is focused on building the best home buying experience out there. Whether you are browsing, buying, selling, renting, or just planning, we are there to help anyone get home. We work across the entire customer journey, from early inspiration and home search through decision-making, collaboration, financing, and transaction. Our teams are developing new consumer experiences at the intersection of product design, artificial intelligence, research, and engineering. We are deeply consumer- and design-minded. We care about making technically ambitious experiences feel intuitive, useful, polished, and distinctly Zillow. As AI changes what products can do and how people interact with them, we are exploring new experience paradigms rather than simply adding new technology to familiar interfaces. About the role We are hiring a Principal Design Technologist to help define and prototype the future of Zillow’s consumer experience. This is a highly hands-on, exploratory role for someone who combines technical depth, product judgment, design sensibility, and a bias toward making. You will work alongside product designers, researchers, product leaders, engineers, data scientists, and AI platform teams to turn emerging technical capabilities into tangible consumer experiences. Your work will move across the end-to-end mover journey. You may explore how an agentic experience understands a customer over time, prototype a new interaction between conversation and visual interfaces, bring an emerging research capability into a consumer context, or help a team make an important product decision by showing rather than describing what could be possible. The gravitational center of the role is not a specific tool, platform, or technical specialty. It is curiosity, proactive ownership, and the ability to use technology and prototyping to advance product definition. You will create experiences that are real enough to learn from, refined enough to inspire confidence, and technically grounded enough to shape the path toward production. In this role, you will Define the future through prototypes Create high-quality, interactive prototypes that help teams explore emerging product opportunities and make better decisions. Turn ambiguous customer, business, and technical questions into tangible experiences that can be evaluated, tested, and advanced. Prototype across conversational, visual, spatial, multimodal, and agentic interfaces. Determine the right level of fidelity for the question at hand, from a fast technical proof of concept to a polished, consumer-grade experience. Use prototyping as a product-definition tool, not simply as a way to demonstrate an already-defined solution. Help teams distinguish between ideas that are technically novel and experiences that create meaningful value for customers. Shape Zillow’s consumer AI experience Partner with product designers and leaders to develop a strong point of view for how our experience should evolve. Explore how conversational systems, dynamic interfaces, personalization, memory, recommendations, and agentic capabilities can work together as a coherent experience. Translate capabilities emerging from Zillow’s design, research, and science teams into understandable and useful consumer interactions. Identify where existing interface conventions are insufficient and prototype new patterns that can influence Zillow’s broader experience direction. Bring rigor to questions of customer control, transparency, trust, responsiveness, and quality in AI-powered experiences. Bring exceptional interaction craft Establish a high bar for interaction design, motion, responsiveness, visual polish, and the details that make an experience feel intuitive and alive. Use motion and behavior to clarify system status, hierarchy, causality, transitions, and the relationship between customer actions and AI responses. Collaborate closely with product designers to strengthen the craft and experiential quality of concepts. Help teams see how technical and interaction decisions combine to create a coherent consumer experience. Advocate for ambitious ideas while maintaining strong judgment about usability, accessibility, performance, and product clarity. Connect disciplines and capabilities Build close working relationships with product design, research, product management, engineering, data science, and senior leadership. Develop a deep understanding of Zillow’s consumer experience, customer needs, product strategy, technical architecture, and business model. Partner with research teams and research-platform teams to bring emerging capabilities into product explorations and generate meaningful customer learning. Work closely with agentic AI engineering and platform teams to understand new capabilities, influence technical direction, and identify opportunities for consumer application. Translate fluently between design intent, product opportunity, research insight, and technical possibility. Make complex systems and emerging technology understandable through clear demonstrations, narratives, and working experiences. Operate with principal-level ownership Proactively identify important experience questions and opportunities rather than waiting for fully formed assignments. Lead exploratory work across organizational and product boundaries, bringing structure and momentum to ambiguous spaces. Decide when to build directly, when to collaborate with a product team, and when to connect existing capabilities in a new way. Help teams learn quickly without sacrificing craft or creating prototypes that misrepresent what the technology can do. Develop reusable technical and interaction patterns when doing so will accelerate future work, while avoiding infrastructure for its own sake. Mentor designers and technologists in prototyping, emerging technology, interaction craft, and technically informed product thinking. Represent the work with clarity and conviction in critiques, technical reviews, customer-research sessions, and leadership discussions. 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 $178,300.00 - $284,700.00 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 $169,300.00 - $270,500.00 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 are intensely curious. You enjoy understanding how new technologies work, but you are even more interested in what they could mean for people. You are proactive and self-directed. You notice consequential questions, create momentum around them, and take responsibility for moving the work forward. You have strong product judgment. You can distinguish an impressive demonstration from an experience that solves a meaningful customer problem. You have exceptional design sensibility and a sharp eye for interaction, motion, visual polish, and craft. You are a hands-on builder. You think through making and are comfortable moving from an idea to a working experience quickly. You are technically fluent enough to explore unfamiliar systems, work effectively with senior engineers and scientists, and make informed architectural trade-offs. You are adaptable. You are not defined by one framework, platform, or type of output, and you expect the tools and technical landscape around you to change. You are comfortable working in ambiguity without mistaking ambiguity for a lack of accountability. You collaborate generously. You bring a strong point of view without treating the work as yours alone. You communicate complex ideas clearly and make emerging technology feel tangible, understandable, and relevant. You are pragmatic about AI. You are excited by its potential, honest about its limitations, and focused on creating customer value rather than chasing novelty. You are comfortable operating as a principal individual contributor, influencing senior leaders and teams through the quality of your thinking, relationships, and work. Qualifications Must have 8+ years of relevant experience across design technology, creative technology, interaction design, product engineering, prototyping, or adjacent disciplines, with meaningful depth in more than one area. A portfolio or body of work demonstrating technically ambitious, high-craft interactive experiences. Strong experience creating functional prototypes that influenced product definition, customer learning, technical direction, or organizational decision-making. Advanced front-end development skills using modern web technologies and frameworks. Demonstrated strength in interaction design, motion, prototyping, and consumer-product craft. Experience working with emerging technologies such as generative AI, conversational systems, agentic architectures, multimodal interfaces, machine learning, or dynamic user interfaces. Ability to work effectively with product designers, researchers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, and senior leaders. Experience independently leading ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from early exploration through a meaningful outcome. Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to present technical and experiential work to senior audiences. Nice to have Experience bringing AI- or machine-learning-powered capabilities into consumer products. Familiarity with LLM orchestration, retrieval systems, tool use, memory, evaluation, generative UI, or agentic interaction patterns. Experience partnering directly with applied research, machine learning, or data science teams. Experience prototyping across web, native mobile, voice, spatial, or multimodal environments. Experience with creative coding, animation systems, game engines, real-time graphics, 3D, or emerging interface technologies. Experience contributing to production codebases or helping product teams translate prototypes into durable implementation. Public work such as open-source projects, talks, installations, experiments, writing, or other contributions to the design-technology community. The strongest candidate may not match every qualification. We are looking for someone with exceptional curiosity, judgment, craft, and technical range who is excited to help invent what a consumer real-estate experience can become. 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.