Kelly Smith

About Kelly Smith

With over a decade of experience in software engineering, I focus on building scalable, self-service platforms that connect data products with data consumers. As a Principal Software Engineer at Zillow, my mission is to create modern, cloud-native systems that accelerate data adoption and foster decentralized ownership. Passionate about simplifying complex workflows, I aim to align technical solutions with Zillow\'s vision of transforming how people find and connect with homes.

Experience

1. Principal Software Engineer

   Zillow

   Jan 2024 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Technical leader for a company-wide strategy to unify streaming and event practices, enabling engineering teams to build intelligent, data driven systems that rapidly respond to user behavior across Zillow\'s integrated super-app- Wrote a highly influential strategy document (viewed by over 300 people, 30+ monthly viewers over 1.5 years) and secured engineering funding from senior leadership. Led the delivery of a self-service platform that has enabled over 15 engineering teams to deploy high quality, discoverable, and interoperable streaming datasets on top of a fully managed, self-service developer platform. Lead time to deliver new events dropped from days to minutes- Successfully scaled this initiative from 1 engineer (myself) to 13 including two managers and a product manager over the course of a year. Served as a technical architect, developed POCs across the entire stack, created strategic partnerships with leaders across the company, and mentored junior engineers- Pioneered the use of AI coding in my organization. Organized and led pair-programming workshops and gave presentations to accelerate adoption of agentic co-pilots (primarily Cursor) across our data organization. Developed and shipped an MCP server for our eventing platform that enables 100% agentic-based implementation of events by dynamically looking up event schemas and SDK documentation.

Education

• Slippery Rock University

  Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

  2009 — 2014

Skills

• Data Visualization
• Android
• Git
• Distributed Architecture
• Dojo
• Mips Assembly
• Visual Studio
• Objective-C
• Php
• Agile Methodologies
• Mac Os X
• Django
• Project Management
• Ajax
• Css
• C
• Programming
• Data Analysis
• Java
• Html
• Big Data
• Mysql
• Openmp
• Data Modeling
• High Performance Computing
• Adobe Photoshop
• Lamp
• Jquery
• Scalability
• Linux
• Stream Processing
• C#
• Mpi
• Scalable Architecture
• Web Development
• Apache
• C++
• Cuda
• Javascript
• User Experience