Sr. Director, Customer Identity and Access Management

The Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) team sits within Foundations Engineering and owns the authentication and authorization platform for one of the most-visited websites in the United States, as well as our associated brands. Every sign-in, AI chat, session and permission check across Zillow's brands runs through systems this team builds and operates. We ship services, SDKs, and components that let product teams move quickly on web, mobile and AI interfaces without each team reinventing identity and access management. We operate like a platform product team, not a gatekeeper. Our customers are the engineers and product teams across Zillow Group, and we measure ourselves by how much faster and safer they can ship because our paved paths exist. Our work spans an authentication platform that securely adapts to users needs as they become more serious about their home buying journey, a fine-grained authorization service designed for high-volume policy evaluation, and a growing set of centralized Customer and Identity services in our Consumer Domain that is the canonical source of truth for who our customers are. This is a team where technical credibility matters. Our leaders write strategy documents, sit in design reviews, and can reason about token lifetimes and authorization models without a translator. If you have spent your career building platforms that other engineers depend on, this is the kind of organization you have been building toward.

As Sr. Director of Customer Identity and Access Management, you will own the strategy, execution, and maturity of Zillow's customer identity platform. You will lead three engineering teams through frontline Engineering Managers and directly support two Principal Engineers who anchor the technical direction of the platform. Three programs define the next two years of this org's work: Centralized Authentication Platform. Consolidating authentication across Zillow Group's brands and surfaces onto a single, well-instrumented platform built on a commercial IdP that we extend substantially to meet consumer scale and experience requirements. Fine-Grained Authorization Platform. Building an authorization service that lets product teams express and evaluate permissions at the resource level, replacing the bespoke and duplicative access logic scattered across applications today. Consumer Domain - Centralized Customer and Identity services. Filling out the domain with authoritative customer and identity services so that profile, account, and entitlement data have one owner and one contract rather than a dozen partial copies. We are looking for a strong, experienced leader. You come from a high-volume software or platform engineering background and you have never fully left it behind. You can earn trust with Principal Engineers, recruit senior talent who could work anywhere, negotiate roadmaps with internal leadership, and then turn around and frame identity investment in business terms for executives to easily understand. You will set multi-year technical roadmaps, own the operational budget and vendor strategy for your organization, and serve as Zillow's senior voice on customer identity, authentication and authorization.

Leadership and Organizational Strategy Lead and develop a multi-team organization through frontline Engineering Managers, setting clear direction, healthy team culture, and high-performance expectations at every level. Directly support Principal Engineers who help you understand complex systems, anchor architectural decisions, and identify opportunities to innovate and align. Take broad strategy and focus areas from senior leadership and transform them into technical strategies, objectives, and tactical plans your teams can execute against. Work hand-in-hand with internal and external AI teams and financial platforms to simplify authentication and authorization while adapting our technical solutions to rapidly evolving