Senior Manager of Microservices

Realtor.com Careers•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Recognized as the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, Realtor.com® has been at the forefront of online real estate for over 25 years, connecting buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance to find their perfect home. Through its robust suite of tools, Realtor.com® not only makes a significant impact on the real estate industry at large, but for consumers, navigating the biggest purchase they will make in their life, by providing a user experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and most of all, easy to make decisions. Join us on our mission to empower more people to find their way home by breaking barriers to entry, making the right connections, and building confidence through expert guidance. We're looking for a Senior Manager of Microservices to lead three critical platform engineering teams that provide enterprise-grade "paved path" solutions for API routing, GraphQL federation, and security/bot protection serving 600+ developers and millions of users daily. This role will build and scale the Frontdoor (API Gateway), our GraphQL Federation layer, and Product Security & Bot Protection teams—managing 8-12 talented individual contributors who maintain and enhance core infrastructure enabling secure, scalable service delivery across Realtor.com. You will be responsible for the strategic direction, continuous enhancement, and operational excellence of our API gateway infrastructure (Tyk), GraphQL federation layer (Apollo), and security perimeter (Kasada).

Requirements

Experience: 8+ years in software engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure; 3+ years leading engineering teams as a manager.
Domain Expertise: Expert-level knowledge in at least two domains: API Gateway technologies (Tyk, Kong, Apigee), GraphQL/Apollo Federation, or Security Engineering (Kasada, PerimeterX, Cloudflare).
Technical Depth: Deep understanding of RESTful and GraphQL API design, AuthN/AuthZ (OAuth 2.0, JWT), request routing, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/Kubernetes/EKS).
Track Record: Proven ability to scale engineering teams and lead complex platform migrations/legacy retirements.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience managing teams supporting 500+ developers.
Background in fraud prevention, identity management, or service mesh (Istio).
Prior experience in real estate technology or high-traffic e-commerce.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Development
Build and lead three specialized platform teams (Frontdoor, Pantheon, Product Security) with 8-12 individual contributors.
Recruit, mentor, and retain top engineering talent with expertise in API management, GraphQL federation, and security engineering.
Create career development frameworks and technical growth paths; conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and team planning.
Foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and developer-first thinking across platform services.
Establish team structures and on-call rotations that balance operational excellence with innovation.
Platform Strategy & Enhancement
Define and execute strategic roadmaps for Frontdoor (Tyk API Gateway), Apollo Federation, and Product Security platforms.
Drive adoption of "paved path" solutions across a 600+ developer organization with a focus on developer experience, self-service, and scalability.
Enhance existing platform capabilities including authentication/authorization, rate limiting, GraphQL schema federation, and bot protection.
Balance production system maintenance with feature development, technical debt reduction, and platform modernization.
Evaluate and recommend new technologies (Kong, MCP on GraphQL gateway, security tools); drive POCs and architecture decisions.
Partner with engineering and product leadership to align platform capabilities with business priorities.
Legacy System Retirement & Modernization
Lead the retirement of legacy systems including rdc-x-api, Hestia/Kasbah, and PerimeterX.
Develop migration strategies, coordinate with stakeholders, and execute safe transitions minimizing business disruption.
Drive deprecation timelines, communication plans, and stakeholder management for platform changes.
Ensure knowledge transfer, documentation, and runbook updates during modernization initiatives.
Technical Leadership & Operations
Provide hands-on technical guidance on complex API routing, GraphQL federation, OAuth, and security architecture challenges.
Establish SLOs, monitoring, and observability practices for platform services; lead incident response and post-mortems.
Champion best practices for API design, GraphQL schema management, rate limiting strategies, and security controls.
Drive automation, infrastructure as code, and operational efficiency improvements.
Maintain expertise across Tyk Gateway, Apollo Federation, Kasada, AWS (EKS, CloudFront, WAF), and Kubernetes.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Partner with Platform Reliability Engineering, Quality Engineering Operations, and Infrastructure teams on reliability initiatives.
Collaborate with Security and Compliance teams on OAuth migrations, secrets management, and security standards.
Support Application Engineering teams consuming platform services; gather feedback and prioritize platform enhancements.