Sr. Software Engineer - Resident Onboarding

AppFolio Inc • Goleta, CA

10d • $138,400 - $190,300 • Hybrid

About The Position

AppFolio is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Resident Onboarding team to make the transition from signing a lease to settling in easier for new residents. The team addresses fragmented, often manual processes involving utility setup, renters insurance, property teams, partner systems, and incomplete data. Its systems serve every new resident on AppFolio's Real Estate Performance Management platform.

The engineer will become a technical domain expert and help set technical direction on a small, empowered team. The role involves owning the onboarding domain end to end, evolving its service architecture, and building scalable, robust solutions to complex business problems. The engineer will lead design decisions, define observability standards, mentor colleagues, and deliver work in an agile manner while maintaining high quality and responding promptly to escalations.

AppFolio describes its work environment as hybrid and flexible, with teams making space for innovation and collaboration and meeting in person during hiring for late-stage candidates. The stated base salary range is $138,400–$190,300; actual pay depends on factors including skills, education, and experience. Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits, but specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional experience building and operating production web services.
• Demonstrated ownership of the architecture of a multi-service system, from design through production support.
• Production experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, or a comparable web stack, and willingness to work in both Ruby on Rails and Go.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to be heard and listen effectively.
• A track record of leading technical design across a team and influencing engineers who do not report to you.
• Deep command of software architecture and design patterns, including the ability to explain when patterns apply and when they do not.
• Ability to reason through system designs in real time, defend them under scrutiny, and revise a position when presented with a better argument.
• Experience integrating third-party services and building resilient pipelines around unreliable external data.
• Ability to write designs clearly enough for engineers outside the team to build against.
• Care for long-term codebase maintainability and advocacy for refactoring and code cleanliness.
• Use of modern tools, including AI-assisted development, while remaining accountable for shipped design decisions.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, React, MySQL, AWS, or service-oriented architecture.
• Experience integrating with utility, insurance, or other consumer-service providers.
• Experience with production observability tooling and on-call practices.
• Willingness to use JIRA despite disliking it.

Responsibilities

• Build a deep understanding of the resident onboarding domain and help the team own it end to end.
• Design and evolve onboarding service architecture, including partner integrations, data pipelines, and interfaces used by other AppFolio teams.
• Lead design reviews, write technical proposals, and drive decisions to closure with clear trade-off analysis.
• Develop scalable, robust, and simple solutions to complex business problems, refactoring existing systems or starting fresh when appropriate.
• Define observability and alerting standards so that alerts are actionable and incidents have clear owners.
• Mentor and guide engineers through in-depth code review, pairing, and constructive technical debate.
• Break large problems into thinly sliced deliverables and execute quickly in an agile fashion.
• Prioritize quality through thoughtful test coverage and promptly handle and resolve escalations from external stakeholders such as onboarding or customer care teams.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed