Principal Business Intelligence Manager

About The Team

Zillow Group's Customer Experience Operations Business Intelligence & Analytics team builds the trusted data foundation behind how we understand, measure, and improve the customer experience. We connect operational, customer, workforce, financial, product, and support signals into governed data products and analytics that power leadership decisions, operational performance, customer intelligence, self-service analytics, and AI-enabled experiences, so teams can rely on consistent definitions, reusable data products, trusted metrics, and scalable semantic logic. As customer experience evolves across human support, self-service, automation, and AI-assisted service, the data foundation underneath has to evolve with it. This Principal Business Intelligence Manager role helps define that foundation, shaping the architecture, standards, and data-product strategy that make our intelligence scalable, trustworthy, and reusable.

About The Role

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who can set the technical and data-product direction for one of the most consequential data foundations at Zillow, the governed layer behind how we understand and improve the customer experience. The customer experience organization runs across many systems, business lines, and support channels, and today the same business question can get different answers depending on the source, dashboard, or team producing it. As we move further into AI-assisted service, self-service analytics, and conversational analytics, governed, reusable, AI-ready data foundations become essential. As a Principal Business Intelligence Manager, you will own the target-state architecture, the semantic-layer strategy, the taxonomy and definition standards, the cross-system identity and linkage strategy, and the reusable data-product patterns that make this ecosystem trustworthy and scalable. You will lead through technical depth, architecture, influence, and hands-on problem-solving, partnering as a peer with senior engineers, BI and analytics leaders, data-platform partners, and stakeholders across product, finance, sales, and operations. You set the business architecture, semantic standards, data-product direction, and source-of-truth strategy that guide what BI and Data Engineering build toward, and Data Engineering owns the production pipelines and platform implementation.

You Will Get To

• Dive deep into Zillow's internal and third-party data to model the customer journeys, operational workflows, workforce structures, financial measurement, and product signals that define customer experience operations.
• Set the target-state architecture for the data foundation, defining how data domains, source systems, grains, identities, taxonomy, and semantic logic fit together from raw signal through to BI, analytics, data science, and AI consumption.
• Design reusable semantic-layer and metrics-as-code patterns that make governed metrics, dimensions, and business logic consumable across Tableau, Databricks, self-service and conversational analytics, and machine-learning and AI workflows.
• Drive alignment on metric definitions, taxonomy standards, source-of-truth expectations, data-product certification, and cross-system identity strategy across business lines, partner teams, and leadership.
• Lead cross-organizational data initiatives tied to company strategy, customer experience priorities, AI enablement, and multi-year roadmap planning, including build-versus-buy recommendations for analytics tooling, semantic-layer platforms, governance systems, and customer-intelligence tooling.
• Partner with Data Engineering, Product Analytics, and central data-platform teams on implementation patterns, with ownership staying clear, you set the business architecture, semantic standards, and source-of-truth strategy, and they own production pipelines and platform implementation.
• Set quality, monitoring, documentation, and reliability expectations for critical data products and reporting surfaces, reducing dependence on individual subject-matter experts so issues are caught early and resolved quickly.
• Mentor senior Business Intelligence Managers, analysts, and analytics engineers by shaping the technical standards, reusable patterns, and strategic direction for business intelligence across the organization.

Who You Are

• 10+ years in data architecture, enterprise data modeling, analytics engineering, or business intelligence data-product leadership, including principal- or staff-level technical ownership of a large, multi-system data environment.
• Expert SQL and data modeling, with experience designing architectures that span multiple business domains, source systems, grains, customer journeys, and consumption patterns.
• Deep expertise in semantic-layer design, metrics-as-code patterns, metric-definition governance, reusable dimensional modeling, and data governance at organizational scale.
• A strong grasp of how AI systems, natural-language query experiences, and machine-learning workflows consume structured, governed data.
• Experience owning or heavily shaping taxonomy, source-of-truth, identity resolution, or semantic governance standards across competing stakeholders and business lines.
• Experience evaluating, adopting, or influencing analytics-engineering tooling at the organizational level, such as Databricks, dbt, Snowflake, semantic-layer platforms, or Tableau.
• Excellent communication and partner-management skills, with a consistent ability to gain alignment across product, engineering, analytics, finance, sales, operations, and executive stakeholders.
• You thrive as a hands-on individual contributor. You lead through technical depth, architecture, credibility, and influence, and you are energized by staying close to the work.
• Strong judgment around decision rights, you know when to recommend, when to facilitate, when to escalate, and when leadership or cross-functional partners need to ratify a decision.
• 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.

Preferred, Nice To Have

• Experience in a customer experience, customer support, operations, marketplace, or multi-product customer journey data domain.
• Experience reconciling competing sources of truth, for example workforce or HR systems versus operational systems.
• Experience partnering with, or working inside, a central data platform, product analytics, or data engineering organization.
• Familiarity with making data foundations ready for AI and self-service analytics, including governed semantic models, natural-language query tools, and AI-ready data products.
• Experience with taxonomy tagging, customer-intelligence systems, contact-driver analysis, interaction intelligence, or journey analytics.
• A track record of mentoring and upleveling BI professionals, analysts, and analytics engineers as a senior technical leader.

Pay

• In California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington state, and Washington DC: $143,600.00 - $229,400.00 annually
• In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia: $136,400.00 - $218,000.00 annually
• This role 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.