Who We Are
Zoopla is one of the UK’s most instantly recognisable property brands. In fact, we’re known and loved by over 91% of the nation (and we’re working hard on the other 9%). Our mission is to help the nation make better home decisions - by connecting everyone to their home and giving them personalised insights to help with moving, managing or financing. Over 50 million people visit Zoopla every month to access exclusive data and information on every UK property, search over 500,000 homes for sale and rent, find the best agents and secure the latest mortgage deals.
We’re a growing, dynamic team that embraces innovation and isn’t afraid to push the boundaries. We’re only just starting our journey to redefine the digital property landscape, with much more to explore and achieve. Join us, and transform the way the nation makes home decisions.
What You'll Do
At Zoopla you will design and run the search and retrieval systems behind the consumer portal, serving millions of users. Search relevance, ranking, and the services and data pipelines that feed them sit at the centre of this role. If you care about robust APIs, fast and relevant search, scalable distributed services, observability, and personalisation, this is for you.
You will work primarily in Python and TypeScript across Node.js and GraphQL, with some services in Golang or Perl. You will own search infrastructure end to end on OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch): indexing, query design, relevance tuning, and performance at scale. You will design and maintain the APIs and data pipelines that power it, working across both SQL and NoSQL stores on AWS.
This is a backend role. You will touch the frontend (React and TypeScript) occasionally when a feature needs it, but deep frontend specialism is not expected.
Requirements (all essential)- Senior engineer who has built and operated high scale systems serving millions of users, and who can point to the trade offs they made to get there.
- Production experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch: indexing strategy, query and relevance tuning, and keeping clusters healthy under load.
- Strong distributed systems and systems design skills, with the ability to reason about consistency, latency, failure modes, and scale.
- Hands on AWS experience running services in production.
- Fluency in backend development with Python and TypeScript, designing and building APIs and services across SQL and NoSQL stores.
- A genuine passion for shipping product features with a high level of autonomy and agency, taking an idea from problem to production with minimal hand holding.
- Excellent communication skills and a track record of working closely with Product and Design to turn ambiguous goals into shipped features.
- Solid engineering craft: maintainable code, code review, pairing when it helps, and meaningful tests.
- Building for stability, security, observability, and performance, not just the happy path.
- A commercial mindset that connects your work to business outcomes.
- You use AI tools as a core part of how you build, from coding assistants to AI driven workflows, and you have a strong sense of where they speed you up and where they need checking.
At Zoopla, we embrace hybrid working but emphasise the importance of also spending time together. You’ll have the opportunity to work remotely (at home) for two days per week with Mondays and Thursdays as all-Zoopla days in the office together plus a third day in-office day of your choosing.
Our home in Tower Bridge is a buzzing hub for collaborative and individual working, with areas to socialise and exercise - within easy reach of London Bridge, Tower Hill and Bermondsey stations. On our doorstep there are plenty of great food spots including a new indoor street food market and landscaped areas to sit by the riverside.
Benefits
- Our hybrid setup means you’ll join us in the Tower Bridge office 3 days each week
- 25 days annual leave + additional leave benefits Including extra days for length of service, plus other leave perks
- Cycle to work and electric car schemes
- Free Calm App membership
- Enhanced Parental leave
- Fertility Treatment Financial Support
- Group Income Protection and private medical insurance
- Gym on-site in London
- 7.5% pension contribution by the company
- Discretionary annual bonus up to 10% of base salary
Zoopla London, England Office
5 Copper Row, London, United Kingdom, SE1 2LH
