Meet Luis, the engineering manager building Zillow from Mexico
Millions of Americans open Zillow when they're trying to search, buy, sell, rent, or finance a home. A portion of that experience is built by engineers in Mexico.
Luis is a senior engineering manager at Zillow, and he leads a team across Mexico and the US, building the seller side of the product from the ground up. We sat down with him for our DevLab series to hear how that work happens and what he's picked up along the way: how to build an engineering career from Mexico, how to get into a big tech company, and how to keep growing once you're in. He's a good person to ask, because he's hired for these roles, went through the interview loops himself before he passed them, and now runs a team on both sides of the border.
Core product, not side projects
One thing Luis tells engineers to check is whether a role is core product or a side project. Some companies, he points out, hire mainly for side work, and you can spend a long time in a job like that without touching anything a customer sees. His own team is the opposite. "We are hiring people to actually join the core product development," he says. His engineers work with senior people in the US on the flows real users depend on.
So in an interview, get specific about what your team actually owns. There's nothing wrong with building internal libraries if that's the work you want. But if you took the job to grow quickly, owning a live product surface and supporting someone else's are very different jobs, and the offer letter rarely tells you which one you're getting. Ask.
High-impact projects are not the same as high-impact systems
Luis draws a line between two things that sound the same. "In Mexico we do have exposure to high-impact projects," he says. "But that doesn't necessarily mean that we have exposure to high-impact systems."
The difference is scale. You can lead a genuinely important project that a few thousand people use and never design for millions of requests a minute. Systems-design interviews probe exactly that: take something you've shipped, then reason about what breaks when it gets a hundred times bigger. Luis's advice is to close that gap before you interview. Study systems design, and practice connecting your past work to how you'd scale it, because that link is what he says interviewers listen for.
Expect to fail the first few times
Luis didn't come from software. His background is electronics engineering, and his first job was at a company where software wasn't even the product. When he started interviewing at the big firms opening offices in Mexico, he didn't get in. Not on the first try, and not on the second. "I had to fail three different times," he says. "Keep trying until you get really good at answering the questions they are asking you, technical questions and behavioral questions."
These loops run four or five rounds across technical and behavioral questions, which Luis says is unlike the interviews most people are used to in Mexico. Two things helped him. He leaned on a structure like the STAR method for the behavioral rounds, so he could walk through a challenge, his impact, and how he solved it without losing the thread. And he points out that the companies now hand out prep material, because they know the format is new, so use it. The process is hard. It's also learnable, and the people who get in, he says, are usually the ones who didn't stop after the first no.
AI is part of the job now, not a bonus
On Luis's team, AI runs through the whole lifecycle. Engineers use it to write code, generate test cases, cut tickets, and review requirements. Product managers use it to shape requirements, designers to explore options. This isn't new for Zillow. The Zestimate, the home-value estimate people have relied on for years, has run on machine learning models since long before the current wave of attention. Luis's advice to his own team is simple: start building with these tools now, and keep changing how you use them, because the way you worked with them six months ago is already dated.
You don't have to become a manager to keep growing
Luis points to a ceiling he sees often in Mexico. You rise as an individual contributor until you run out of levels, and from there the only way up is management, whether or not you want to manage people. Engineers end up running teams they never wanted to run, just to keep moving.
"You don't need to be a manager to keep growing on your career," he says. On his team the IC and management tracks have parity, and a senior individual contributor can operate at the level of a director or a VP without taking on reports. If you love building and have no interest in managing people, that's worth checking for wherever you're interviewing. It carries more weight coming from someone who took the management track himself and still says you shouldn't have to.
What actually makes a distributed team work
Luis thinks the split across two countries makes the work better, not harder. Engineers in Mexico and the US ask each other the questions the other side takes for granted. He compared it to his daughter asking why the sky is blue, the kind of naive-sounding question that forces you to go and actually understand something instead of assuming you already do. Mixed teams generate more of those, and better answers come out the other side.
The rest of the culture is built to hold a distributed team together on purpose. There's Hack Week, when engineers leave their normal team, pitch ideas, and build, sometimes flying in to work on it together; Luis tells his own team, "just forget about your manager, join a different team, and enjoy building net new things," and some of what comes out of it ships. The company runs on what it calls Cloud HQ, with in-person retreats at least once a year. Luis has worked somewhere that skipped the in-person part, and felt the gap it left, as both a manager and a teammate.
None of this is a reason to join anywhere on its own. But it's the part of a job that decides what your week feels like and whether you're better in a year, and it's worth interrogating as hard as the comp.
Watch the full conversation
Luis goes into more detail in the full DevLab episode, including how his team builds Zillow's seller experience, what Zillow looks for when it hires engineers, and how careers grow once you're in.
