Staff SRE Engineer

Realtor.com•Austin, TX

28d

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. About the Role We are seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our newly formed Operations Excellence organization, reporting to the Director, Operations Excellence. This foundational role will shape the reliability, observability, and operational excellence of our platform infrastructure serving millions of users. As a Staff SRE, you will be a technical leader and mentor who establishes best practices, drives architectural decisions, and enables our 600+ engineers to deliver exceptional customer experiences. You will work on critical platform systems including EKS infrastructure, Skyway (CI/CD), Frontdoor (Tyk API Gateway), Pantheon (Apollo GraphQL Federation), and our observability stack, while establishing chaos engineering practices and driving cost optimization initiatives with measurable ROI.

Requirements

8+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering with proven track record improving system reliability
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
5+ years hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM) and Kubernetes including multi-cluster management
Strong programming skills (Python, Go, or Java) with infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation)
Production experience with observability tools (NewRelic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) and distributed systems architecture
Experience with CI/CD platforms and GitOps workflows (CircleCI, Argo CD, Jenkins);
on-call rotation and high-severity incident response
Excellent communication with ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
Proven mentorship and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and business teams
Self-motivated and autonomous with systems thinking mindset focused on long-term sustainability
Data-driven decision making with customer-centric approach and empathy for developer experience
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, Fargate, Lambda, VPC, Route53, CloudFront), Kubernetes, Docker, Istio Service Mesh
CI/CD & GitOps: Argo CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
Observability: NewRelic - APM, distributed tracing, metrics & logging; Splunk - logging
IaC & Automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, Kustomize, Python/Go/Bash
Platform Services: Tyk Gateway, Apollo GraphQL, AWS Secrets Manager, Vault
Incident Management: OpsGenie, PagerDuty, ServiceNow

Nice To Haves

Chaos engineering tools, API Gateway technologies (Tyk/Kong), GraphQL federation (Apollo), cost optimization initiatives with measurable ROI, FinOps principles

Responsibilities

Design and maintain highly available AWS infrastructure including EKS clusters, Fargate (ECS), and multi-region architectures
Own reliability of critical services: Skyway (CI/CD), Frontdoor (Tyk), Pantheon (Apollo GraphQL), and supporting infrastructure
Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for Tier 1/2/3 systems; lead architectural reviews for reliability and cost-efficiency
Drive adoption of reliability patterns including circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and automated failover
Build comprehensive observability using NewRelic for APM, distributed tracing, metrics, and logging for rapid troubleshooting
Create actionable dashboards and alerts that reduce MTTD and MTTR; establish observability standards across teams
Analyze infrastructure spend and implement FinOps practices including rightsizing, reserved capacity, and resource lifecycle management
Drive cost-conscious architecture decisions and optimize CI/CD spend (CircleCI, Argo CD optimization)
Design chaos engineering experiments to identify system weaknesses; build frameworks for safe production testing
Lead game day exercises and disaster recovery simulations; create runbooks and automation for resilience
Participate in on-call rotation for critical systems; lead post-incident reviews and drive systemic improvements
Mentor engineers on incident response, communication, and escalation; contribute to System Health Scorecard
Serve as technical leader and mentor for the growing Operations Excellence team; establish SRE principles and culture
Partner with Platform Engineering, Quality Engineering, and product teams on reliability initiatives
Support security initiatives including AWS Secrets Manager migration and compliance requirements (SOC 2, PCI, GDPR)
Contribute to Developer Experience metrics and platform adoption goals