Principal Design Technologist, AI Design Tools

About The Team

Zillow Experience Design (ZxD) shapes how people discover, buy, sell, and rent homes. Within ZxD, the Design Foundations team integrates Zillow’s design language into the workflows of every designer, engineer, researcher, and product manager. We own the accessibility, design systems, brand, and content standards that create a high-quality, harmonious experience.

About The Role

We're hiring a Principal Design Technologist to own AI design tooling for builders across Zillow. You'll sit on the Design Foundations team and own how ZxD’s design language, systems, and standards integrate into AI tools. These AI tools will be used to create user-facing experiences, including early explorations, eng-ready prototypes, and production code. Zillow’s product, engineering, and design teams use AI daily to create experiences for web, iOS, and Android. Because no standard workflow exists, teams apply our design system, brand guidelines, and accessibility specs in their own way, leading to wasted effort and inconsistent results. This role owns the end-to-end design tooling ecosystem and sets the standard for how AI-augmented design happens at Zillow.

Qualifications

• Must have 8+ years of relevant experience across design, and front-end engineering, with meaningful depth across one or more areas.
• Production experience shipping internal-facing tooling for designers or engineers that measurably changed how a team worked. Examples: a Figma plugin used at scale, an MCP server in production, a Skill or extension with documented adoption, a component library or token pipeline with real downstream consumers.
• Strong fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) and the patterns that make them productive in real codebases: structured context, retrieval, agent skills, evals, tool integration.
• Strong front-end engineering depth. Comfortable opening PRs in real repos, including the design system codebase.
• Working knowledge of design systems: component libraries, tokens, primitives, accessibility, multi-brand or multi-surface theming.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical work to senior design and product leaders, and to translate between disciplines.
• Experience running adoption and enablement efforts (training, guides, comms) as a complement to infrastructure.