Principal Product Designer, Mover Experience 20

Principal Design Technologist

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.

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.