This month, Zillow officially celebrated the 20th anniversary of the real estate website’s debut. One executive who has served as a senior leader from the ground floor is David Beitel, who has served as CTO for Zillow’s entire existence.
“I really only had two jobs my whole career,” says Beitel. He initially joined Microsoft as a software design engineer in the 1990s and was slotted into a travel product division that would eventually become travel technology giant Expedia Group. It was there that he initially met two future co-founders of Zillow, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink.
Throughout the past two decades, Beitel’s north star goal as CTO has been to infuse technology throughout all stages of the home buying process, making it easier for shoppers to search for a home, find an agent, schedule tours, make a successful offer, and complete a transaction. But he has also been keenly focused on internal use cases and says there’s not one part of the business where artificial intelligence isn’t being considered as a tool that can improve workflows.
Zillow’s engineers have been using AI coding assistant tools like Cursor and Claude for well over two years. Beitel says the secret sauce is that Zillow constantly tests these AI coding tools and models, making constant adjustments to ensure the team is using the best technology for the desired outcome. Zillow measures productivity, as well as the quality of the work these AI coding assistants produce. Overall, “the tools are getting very good,” says Beitel. “The models are improving every month.”
