Data Engineer, San Francisco, CA

HomeLight is on a mission to empower people to make smarter decisions during one of life’s most important moments—buying or selling a home. By analyzing over 40 million real‑estate transactions and leveraging data‑driven algorithms, we match clients with top‑performing agents and guide them through every step of the process.

About the role

We are building our first Data Engineering team to tackle diverse data challenges and provide mission‑critical data to both our algorithms and internal users. This role owns the development, optimization, and operation of data pipelines that collect, process, and distribute data across HomeLight products.

Responsibilities

• Optimize and execute requests to pull, analyze, interpret, and visualize data.
• Partner with team leaders to build and iterate on team and individual performance metrics.
• Improve data release processes and collaborate with leads to enhance existing pipelines.
• Design and develop systems that ingest and transform data streams using modern tools.
• Design, build, and integrate new databases and data warehouses, create schemas, and innovate data storage solutions.
• Research, architect, build, and test robust, highly available, and massively scalable systems, software, and services.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in data, software, or backend engineering roles.
• Experience applying large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering to real‑world workflows.
• Strong proficiency in Python for building services, data pipelines, and backend systems.
• Experience designing, building, and operating service‑oriented architectures and APIs.
• Solid understanding of data modeling, system design, and scalable architecture patterns.
• Hands‑on experience with data pipelines and ETL workflows (e.g., Airflow or similar).
• Experience with AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Codex, Claude Code).
• Strong analytical thinking with a bias toward automation and building scalable systems.
• Nice to have:
  • Experience building and scaling product features using Ruby on Rails or Django.
  • Familiarity with AWS to support production applications.
  • Familiarity with Elasticsearch or other search technologies for user‑facing features.
  • Exposure to LLM‑powered product use cases (ChatGPT, conversational interfaces, automation).
  • Experience working in a startup or fast‑paced environment with high ownership.

Benefits

• Medical (Anthem or Kaiser), Dental & Vision (Guardian)
• Long‑Term Disability & Short‑Term Disability, Hospital Indemnity Insurance (Aflac)
• 401k (Accrue)
• Life Insurance (Guardian) & Pet Insurance (Nationwide)
• Commuter benefits for in‑office employees
• PTO, including Volunteer Days
• Annual anniversary perks, professional development, and sabbaticals
• HomeLight services to assist with buying and selling your home