Senior Manager, Incident Management

About the team

Zillow Group is seeking a Senior Manager, Incident Management (M4) to lead our incident and problem management function and elevate how we drive operational excellence across production systems. This role owns the strategy, process, and people behind incident response and problem management, ensuring we not only resolve incidents quickly but prevent recurrence and continuously raise the bar on reliability.

At the M4 level, success is anchored in four core areas: Program Leadership: building and scaling the incident and problem management practice across the organization; Problem Management: driving structured root cause analysis and systemic fixes that reduce repeat incidents; AI-Enabled Operations: leveraging AI workflows and tooling to increase the speed, quality, and actionability of incident and problem outputs for internal partners; and People Leadership: developing a high-performing team of incident managers and setting the standard for operational rigor.

About the role

Responsibilities

Incident Management Leadership

Own the end-to-end incident management program, including process design, tooling, and governance across the organization

Serve as executive escalation point and senior decision-maker for critical, high-severity, or cross-functional incidents

Set and enforce standards for incident severity classification, escalation paths, and communication protocols

Partner with Engineering, Product, and business leadership to align incident response with business priorities and risk tolerance

Drive executive-level incident communications, ensuring leadership has clear, timely, and accurate visibility into impact and status

Problem Management

Build and own a formal problem management practice that connects incident trends to systemic root causes

Ensure every significant incident produces a rigorous, blameless root cause analysis (RCA) with clearly owned, tracked corrective actions

Establish mechanisms to identify recurring issues, chronic risks, and process gaps across incident history

Hold cross-functional partners accountable for closing problem records and remediation items on committed timelines

Report on problem management outcomes and reliability trends to leadership, tying them to measurable risk reduction

Leveraging AI Workflows for Speed & Quality

Champion the adoption of AI-powered tooling and workflows across incident detection, triage, summarization, and RCA drafting

Design and continuously improve AI-assisted workflows that turn raw incident and problem data into clear, actionable insights for internal partners

Ensure AI-generated call-outs, summaries, and reports meet a high bar for accuracy, relevance, and actionability before reaching stakeholders

Identify opportunities to automate repetitive operational tasks (documentation, status updates, trend analysis) to free the team to focus on higher-value judgment work

Partner with Engineering and Data teams to pilot, evaluate, and scale new AI capabilities that improve mean-time-to-resolution and mean-time-to-detection

People & Team Leadership

Hire, coach, and develop a team of incident managers, building depth and bench strength across severity levels

Set clear performance expectations and career growth paths for the team

Establish on-call structures, workload balance, and rotations that sustain team health and reliability coverage

Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and blameless learning within the team

Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement

Define and track key metrics (MTTR, MTTD, recurrence rate, action-item closure rate) to measure program health and impact

Continuously refine runbooks, tooling, and workflows based on retrospectives and data trends

Facilitate post-incident reviews for major incidents, ensuring lessons learned translate into concrete process or system changes

Benchmark practices against industry standards and bring in outside best practices where relevant

Scope & Impact

Owns the incident and problem management strategy and roadmap for the organization

Accountable for outcomes across the full incident lifecycle, from detection through remediation and prevention

Directly manages a team of incident managers and indirectly influences engineering and support teams during incident response

Shapes how AI and automation are applied across operational workflows, with measurable impact on speed and quality of output

Decisions and process changes influence reliability posture and stakeholder trust across the broader organization

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 $132,400.00 - $211,600.00 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 $125,800.00 - $201,000.00 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

8+ years of experience in incident management, SRE, technical operations, or a related field, including 2+ years of people management experience (or equivalent combination of education and experience)

Proven track record building or scaling an incident management and/or problem management program

Strong understanding of structured incident management practices (triage, escalation, post-incident review) and formal problem management methodologies

Experience leveraging AI tools or workflows (e.g., LLM-based summarization, automation, analytics) to improve operational speed and output quality

Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to distill complex technical situations into clear, actionable updates for executives and internal partners

Demonstrated sound judgment, composure, and decision-making under pressure during high-severity or ambiguous situations

Experience coaching and developing incident managers or similar operational talent

Comfortable partnering across Engineering, Product, Support, and business leadership to drive alignment and accountability

Plus: Experience with incident management/on-call tooling (e.g., Rootly, JIRA, ServiceNow) and AI-driven operations tooling

Plus: Exposure to distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or large-scale consumer applications

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 gro