Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Realtor.com Careers•Austin, TX

9h•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. The Lead Services engineering team runs Realtor.com®’s Tier 1, mission-critical lead platform — the real-time system that ingests, allocates, and delivers the leads that directly drive revenue across our products and business lines. From the moment a consumer raises their hand to the instant a high-intent opportunity reaches the right agent or partner, this team ensures those connections are fast, reliable, and observable end-to-end. The team strives for innovation and excellence using the latest technology and frameworks, leveraging AI coding assistants and LLMs proficiently to accelerate development velocity, generate boilerplate, and troubleshoot complex debugging scenarios. The role requires critical judgment to verify AI-generated outputs for security, performance, and accuracy, and comfort integrating AI tooling into daily workflow to eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing focus on high-impact architectural and strategic engineering challenges.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in large‑scale, distributed systems and 3+ years influencing architecture and design across multiple teams.
Demonstrated track record leading complex, ambiguous initiatives end‑to‑end (design → implementation → rollout → operations) with measurable business and reliability outcomes.
Proven ability to set technical direction for a problem space, align multiple teams, and drive execution without formal authority.
Deep proficiency in at least one of Python, TypeScript/Node, or similar back‑end languages, and familiarity with React/TypeScript for full‑stack collaboration.
Experience designing and operating cloud-native services on AWS (EKS, containers, managed databases, messaging/streaming) with modern CI/CD (e.g., CircleCI, ArgoCD).
Strong grounding in system design, data modeling, and API design (REST/GraphQL), including performance, resilience, and security considerations.
Comfort working with observability tooling (metrics, logs, traces) and using data to debug, optimize, and harden systems in production.
Independent and can manage your own projects and time with ease, all the while setting and managing stakeholder expectations
Strong communication skills: you can explain complex trade‑offs clearly to engineers, product partners, and non‑technical stakeholders, and you adapt your message to the audience.
A track record of mentoring and elevating other engineers, helping them grow into Staff and beyond through coaching, clear expectations, and actionable feedback.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/related field or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in high‑throughput, high‑availability platforms (e.g., marketplaces, transactional or event-driven systems) is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Own system architecture and evolution for key parts of the Lead Services platform (e.g., lead ingestion pipelines, allocation engines, delivery services, ARM/lead management), defining clear boundaries, contracts, and data models between services.
Lead design and delivery of complex, cross-squad initiatives—from early discovery and technical design through implementation, rollout (including CRs/CAB where required), and post‑launch iteration.
Shape the technical roadmap for Lead Services: partner with EMs, PMs, and Principal Engineers to define and sequence work that advances both business goals and platform health (performance, reliability, security, cost).
Raise the quality and reliability bar by driving best practices in testing (unit, integration, e2e), observability, and change management (CircleCI, ArgoCD, Jira CRs), and by using DORA and incident metrics to guide improvements.
Provide technical leadership across Builder teams, coaching Staff/Senior Engineers and Tech Leads, reviewing designs and PRs for high‑risk changes, and aligning teams on shared patterns and paved paths.
Partner closely with Product Management to translate customer and business problems into robust technical solutions, shaping scope, trade‑offs, and phased delivery plans that tie into Goals, Initiatives, and Epics in Jira.
Lead operational excellence: influence on‑call practices, incident response (Phoenix), and RCA quality; ensure services meet or exceed SLAs for lead ingest and delivery while continuously reducing incident volume and MTTR.
Influence engineering culture by contributing to shared standards (DoD, design / incident / CR templates), documenting patterns in Confluence/Backstage, and driving adoption across Lead Services and adjacent communities.