Sr. Backend Software Engineer

Realtor.com Careers•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a Sr. Backend Software Engineer to join the Notifications team and help design, build, and operate the next generation of our notification platform. In this role, you will: Own core backend services that power notification preferences, home alerts, and notification delivery for initiatives like Project Columbus (Updated Notification Preferences and Alerts by Geo). Work across event-driven architectures, real-time delivery pipelines, and storage systems that serve notification history and campaign traffic at scale. Partner closely with CRM Marketing, Search, Mobile teams to deliver reliable, observable, and cost‑efficient notification experiences.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend systems and distributed services in production environments.
Experience with TypeScript/JavaScript/Node.js.
Proficiency in at least one modern backend language such as Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, or Python, and a track record of building secure, testable, maintainable services and APIs.
Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka/MSK, SQS), including designing resilient producers/consumers and handling retries, DLQs, and backfills.
Hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., Lambda, ECS/EKS, S3, API Gateway, IAM, SQS) and Infrastructure‑as-Code frameworks (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform, or similar).
Experience with NoSQL and cache technologies such as MongoDB Atlas and Redis (or comparable systems), including schema design and performance tuning for high‑volume workloads.
Strong CI/CD and testing mindset, including building and extending pipelines (e.g., CircleCI + GitHub + Argo), and applying unit, integration, and contract testing to services and data flows.
Solid observability skills, using tools such as New Relic and Splunk (or equivalents) to define SLIs/SLOs, build dashboards, and reduce mean time to detection and recovery.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work closely with product, marketing, analytics, and other engineering teams, and to communicate clearly about risks, trade‑offs, and timelines.
Ability to operate in an on‑call rotation in US time zones, owning production incidents end‑to-end and driving follow‑up improvements.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with notifications, messaging, or campaign delivery systems (push, email, in‑app notifications), including rate limiting, preference management, and history storage.
Experience with CRM and marketing platforms such as Braze, Cordial, Hightouch, or similar activation tools, and integrations between internal data platforms and external providers.
Background in real‑time personalization or alerts (e.g., saved searches, alerts by geo, behavioral triggers) where correctness, latency, and relevance are critical.
Familiarity with security and compliance practices, including secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager, Skyway Vault), AppID tagging, and cloud cost/usage governance.
Experience contributing to tech modernization and platform re‑architecture efforts (e.g., migrating serverless workflows to EKS‑based services, improving throughput and state recovery for high‑volume pipelines).

Responsibilities

Design and implement scalable backend services and APIs for notification preferences, notification delivery, and notification storage, using modern backend languages and frameworks (e.g., Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, or Python) on AWS.
Extend and evolve our event-driven architecture for notifications, leveraging Kafka, SQS, and AWS services to reduce latency and improve reliability for push and email sends.
Build and maintain data models and storage layers (e.g., MongoDB Atlas, Redis) to support high-volume reads/writes, notification history, and preference lookups at scale.
Implement and harden CI/CD pipelines on our paved path (CircleCI, GitHub, Argo) to enable safe, frequent deployments with strong automated test coverage.
Own the health of the services you build, including metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerts using tools like New Relic and Splunk, and participate in an on‑call rotation for Notifications services (Pigeon, Notification Center, Preferences APIs, and pipelines).
Improve system reliability and performance by driving projects to simplify architectures (e.g., replatforming Pigeon to an event‑driven model, improving DLQ handling, and replacing legacy step functions and throttlers with SQS consumers).
Contribute to cost and resiliency initiatives, including logging/CloudWatch optimization, secrets migration to AWS Secrets Manager/Skyway Vault, and scaling strategies for notification databases and infrastructure.
Author and maintain runbooks and operational playbooks for on‑call responders, covering incident response, rollbacks, backfills, and replay strategies for notification workloads.
Partner with CRM Marketing and Product to translate business requirements for campaigns, alerts, and notification preferences into robust technical designs and incremental delivery plans.
Collaborate with Search, CPS, Identity, Orchestration, and Data teams to ensure notification flows (e.g., Alerts by Geo, saved search alerts, preference syncs) are correct, observable, and performant end‑to-end.
Participate in and lead technical design discussions, documenting trade‑offs and making recommendations that balance delivery speed, reliability, and total cost of ownership.
Contribute to team rituals (planning, grooming, retros, incident reviews), helping to de‑risk projects via spikes/POCs, clear recommendations, and proactive communication on risks and timelines.
Write clear, maintainable, and well‑tested code, and participate actively in code reviews to raise the bar on quality, security, and performance.
Mentor and support other engineers on the team through pairing, design reviews, and feedback, especially around backend design, observability, and operational discipline.
Contribute to shared standards for Notifications and Consumer (patterns, libraries, templates, and best practices) to reduce friction and improve consistency across services.