Software Engineer, Staff - DevOps

Realtor.com Careers•Austin, TX

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Realtor.com® is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to join their CI/CD Platform team. This role is a high-impact opportunity to help build and scale shared delivery and infrastructure capabilities that support engineers across Realtor.com®. The engineer will be a senior technical contributor responsible for defining platform standards, strengthening delivery workflows, and improving the developer experience for teams building and operating cloud-native products. The role involves taking ownership of critical platform initiatives across self-service CI/CD, GitOps, Kubernetes, AWS infrastructure, security, reliability, and observability. A 'RealOwnership' mindset is required to turn complex infrastructure and governance needs into reusable, developer-friendly capabilities that help hundreds of engineers move code from commit to production safely and efficiently. The role also involves leveraging AI coding assistants and LLMs proficiently to accelerate development velocity, generate boilerplate, and troubleshoot complex debugging scenarios, while applying critical judgment to verify AI-generated outputs for security, performance, and accuracy.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in cloud platform, DevOps, infrastructure, SRE, or software engineering roles with significant infrastructure ownership.
4+ years of hands-on experience designing, provisioning, and troubleshooting AWS infrastructure in production environments.
3+ years of experience managing production-grade Kubernetes or Amazon EKS environments.
Demonstrated experience building reusable platform capabilities, cloud governance systems, internal tooling, or self-service infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
Experience influencing technical standards and architecture across team boundaries without relying on formal management authority.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, VPC, IAM, Lambda, Fargate, Route 53, AWS Organizations, and related cloud services.
Kubernetes & Containers: Kubernetes, EKS, Docker, Helm, cluster governance, workload security, networking, and lifecycle management.
IaC & Automation: Terraform preferred; CloudFormation, CDK, Terragrunt, Ansible, Python, Go, Java, or Bash.
CI/CD & GitOps: Argo CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable delivery platforms.
Governance & Security: Cloud Custodian, AWS Service Control Policies, policy as code, IAM, RBAC, secrets management, vulnerability management, or comparable controls.
Developer Platforms: Backstage, service catalogs, internal developer portals, self-service infrastructure, platform APIs, or paved-path design.
Observability & Operations: Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, distributed systems monitoring, incident response, and post-incident analysis.
Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
Collaborative approach to working across engineering, security, finance, product, and business teams.
Self-motivated and comfortable solving ambiguous problems in a growing platform organization.
Data-driven decision-making with empathy for developer experience.
Practical judgment about when to standardize, when to provide flexibility, and how to drive adoption of shared platform capabilities.
RealOwnership mindset with a focus on durable systems, measurable outcomes, and continuous improvement.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with Cloud Custodian, Backstage, AWS SCPs, or FinOps practices.
Experience with Istio or another service mesh, including secure service-to-service communication and traffic management.
Experience with multi-account, multi-region, hybrid-cloud, or regulated environments.
Experience building automated remediation, policy enforcement, or cloud cost-management systems.
Certifications such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, or AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of an enterprise self-service CI/CD platform and cloud-native application runtimes.
Define reusable platform patterns that improve delivery speed, reliability, security, and operational consistency across engineering.
Partner with engineering leaders and technical teams to assess platform needs, make architecture tradeoffs, and guide adoption of shared capabilities.
Design, provision, and operate production-grade AWS infrastructure, including EKS, EC2, RDS, VPC, IAM, S3, Lambda, Fargate, Route 53, and related platform services.
Build and manage highly available EKS clusters across multiple regions in a resilient, multi-cluster topology.
Define operational patterns for Kubernetes access control, workload security, networking, upgrades, observability, and lifecycle management.
Support reliable containerized workloads using Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and related cloud-native technologies.
Optimize workload scheduling, cluster capacity, autoscaling, and cloud resource utilization using tools and patterns such as Karpenter.
Standardize and maintain enterprise-scale CI/CD workflows using platforms such as CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
Deploy and evolve multi-cluster GitOps workflows using Argo CD to automate application lifecycle management across environments.
Build reusable pipeline templates and automation that abstract cloud complexity for product developers.
Integrate infrastructure as code, policy checks, security validation, and operational readiness into delivery workflows.
Build and improve self-service platform capabilities that allow engineering teams to provision and operate infrastructure without unnecessary manual intervention.
Run and extend internal developer portal capabilities such as Backstage, including service catalogs, plugins, onboarding workflows, and platform documentation.
Build and extend policy-as-code and automated remediation capabilities using tools such as Cloud Custodian, AWS Organizations, AWS Service Control Policies, or equivalent technologies.
Create detection, reporting, and remediation workflows that identify cloud risk, configuration drift, orphaned resources, and cost issues before they become operational problems.
Work with Engineering, Security, and Finance to translate governance requirements into automated, developer-friendly controls.
Drive cloud cost optimization through rightsizing, utilization analysis, reserved capacity, Savings Plans, spot usage, autoscaling, and workload lifecycle management.
Build cost controls, dashboards, alerts, and reporting that help teams understand resource consumption and make cost-conscious architecture decisions.
Improve platform observability using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent technologies.
Contribute to incident response, post-incident reviews, runbooks, and reliability improvements for shared platform capabilities.
Improve deployment reliability, disaster recovery readiness, and operational resilience across engineering.
Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams through architecture reviews, design guidance, documentation, and hands-on delivery.
Mentor engineers in infrastructure automation, cloud governance, platform engineering, and operational best practices.
Maintain an active coding footprint in Python, Go, Java, Bash, or similar languages used to build platform automation and internal tooling.
Build alignment across Engineering, Security, Finance, and other business partners while communicating complex technical concepts clearly.