Zillow no longer has a chief operating officer. It has a chief financial officer who also runs operations.
The company announced on Aug. 5 that it expanded Jeremy Hofmann’s role, appointing him chief operating officer in addition to his existing job as chief financial officer, with responsibility for both financial strategy and day-to-day operational execution. The change is already in effect.
The reason the seat opened up is the part that matters. Jun Choo, who had been chief operating officer since November 2024, is stepping down from the role to focus on his health and will stay on in an advisory capacity through the end of 2026. The executive reshuffle followed layoffs affecting roughly 7% of Zillow’s staff.
So the sequence is: a workforce cut, an operations chief departing on health grounds, and a company that chose not to hire a replacement. Instead of running a search, Zillow folded the job into the one executive who already had a full view of the numbers.
The board pointed to Hofmann’s nine-year tenure, his command of company strategy and financial architecture, his understanding of how the business’s operating pieces depend on one another, and the strength of the finance team he built. “Jeremy is an exceptional financial and operational leader and a critical strategic partner to the entire executive team and me,” Zillow Group Chief Executive Jeremy Wacksman said.
For a company that just cut headcount, consolidating two executive seats into one is also a cost decision, and a fast one.
Hofmann came to the finance job from Wall Street. Before joining Zillow he spent nearly a decade in financial services, most of it at Goldman Sachs, where he was a vice president in investment banking. He was named chief financial officer in 2023.
Zillow, which trades on the Nasdaq, was not the only company to merge the two roles last week.
Zoetis, the Parsippany, N.J., animal-health company, announced on Aug. 6 that it had appointed James “Jay” Saccaro as executive vice president, chief financial officer and chief operating officer, effective Aug. 17. The role is newly created. Saccaro will lead global finance — capital allocation, financial strategy, reporting and controls, and investor engagement — and will also oversee Global Manufacturing and Supply.
That second piece is narrower than it sounds. Zoetis did not put all of operations under the finance chief. It put the factories and the supply chain there.
Saccaro joins from GE HealthCare, where he was chief financial officer since 2023. Before that he was executive vice president and chief financial officer at Baxter International from 2015 to 2023, where he worked on the company’s post-spin transformation, margin improvement and capital structure. “Jay brings a unique combination of skills to this newly created leadership position,” Zoetis Chief Executive Kristin Peck said. “He is a seasoned finance executive with 12 years of CFO experience at some of the world’s leading healthcare companies.”
Wetteny Joseph, the current finance chief, moves to an advisory role on the same date and will remain with the company as a special advisor to the chief executive on financial matters until early 2027.
Zoetis is paying for the combined job. Saccaro’s offer letter, dated July 31, sets a $1 million base salary, a target annual bonus equal to 100% of base, and an annual long-term incentive opportunity of $5 million in performance stock units, restricted stock units and options. He also receives a one-time make-whole stock award of $6.25 million vesting over three years and a one-time make-whole cash award of $1.25 million, repayable if he leaves under certain circumstances.
Two companies in unrelated industries reaching the same structure in two days is not proof of a trend, and the two cases are not the same. Zillow consolidated a role after an unplanned departure and a downsizing. Zoetis built a role from scratch and recruited an outside executive to fill it, at a price that signals the job is meant to be permanent.
What they share is the logic of the reporting line. When the person setting the budget is also the person accountable for hitting the operating targets that budget funds, the argument between finance and operations happens inside one head instead of across a conference table. Decisions on hiring, capital spending, procurement and technology move faster.
The risk sits on the other side of the same fact. The finance chief’s own job has expanded over the past decade to include investor communication, internal controls, cybersecurity spending and regulatory compliance. Adding an operating platform on top requires deep benches in accounting, treasury and the business units — because there is no longer a peer executive whose full-time job is to push back.
For shareholders, the measures are ordinary and will take several quarters to read: operating margin, expense growth and free cash flow. At Zillow specifically, whether combining the roles helped or simply concentrated authority will show up in how efficiently the company converts its traffic into transaction revenue with a smaller workforce.
JBizNews Desk | Seattle
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