Senior Principal Engineer

About the role

Realtor.com is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to provide company-wide technical leadership across our consumer applications, search platforms, data and machine learning systems, APIs, and AI-enabled products. This is one of the most senior individual-contributor roles at Realtor.com. You will help define the technical direction for a high-scale digital marketplace used by millions of consumers. You will work across organizational boundaries to solve the company's most complex engineering problems, shape long-term architecture, and ensure that major technology investments improve customer experience, business growth, reliability, security, and engineering velocity.

Responsibilities

• Shape Company-Wide Technical Direction
• Help define Realtor.com's target architecture and multi-year technology strategy across web, mobile, search, APIs, identity, data, machine learning, AI, and developer platforms.
• Translate business and product priorities into scalable, secure, and practical technical roadmaps.
• Identify architectural risks, platform gaps, modernization opportunities, and areas of unnecessary complexity.
• Establish lightweight standards and reference architectures that improve consistency without slowing teams down.
• Advise senior engineering and product leaders on major technology investments and build-versus-buy decisions.
• Lead Critical Cross-Company Initiatives
• Provide technical leadership for high-impact programs spanning multiple products, platforms, and engineering organizations.
• Define end-to-end architectures, key interfaces, decision points, and implementation paths.
• Remain engaged from technical discovery through delivery, rollout, and operational adoption.
• Step into critical incidents, performance issues, security concerns, or architectural escalations where senior technical judgment is required.
• Drive alignment when requirements are ambiguous or ownership is distributed across teams.
• Lead Search, Data, and Machine Learning Architecture
• Provide architectural leadership for large-scale search, ranking, recommendations, personalization, and location-based experiences.
• Guide the design of data pipelines, feature platforms, model-serving systems, experimentation frameworks, and real-time decisioning capabilities.
• Partner with product, data science, machine learning, and engineering teams to move models reliably from experimentation into production.
• Establish patterns for model evaluation, observability, explainability, cost management, privacy, and responsible AI.
• Help evolve search and ML platforms that improve relevance, engagement, conversion, and customer trust.
• Strengthen Platform, Reliability, and Security
• Guide architecture across APIs, distributed services, event-driven systems, identity, cloud infrastructure, and shared platforms.
• Improve service boundaries, data ownership, observability, resilience, scalability, and failure isolation.
• Partner with security teams to embed security, privacy, and compliance into system design.
• Turn recurring operational issues into durable architectural improvements rather than repeated tactical fixes.

Qualifications

• Extensive software engineering experience (15+ years), including leadership as a Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect, or equivalent senior technical role.
• A proven record of shaping architecture across large, complex, high-scale engineering organizations.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, APIs, data systems, observability, security, and reliability engineering.
• Strong knowledge of search systems, ranking, recommendations, personalization, and high-volume data platforms.
• Experience building and operating machine learning or generative AI systems in production.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple organizations without direct authority.
• Strong judgment in balancing speed, customer value, operational risk, cost, and long-term architectural health.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• A history of mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards across an organization.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of related experience.

Benefits

• Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage.
• Family forming benefits.
• 13 Paid Holidays.
• Flexible Time Off.
• 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off.
• Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match.
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degree and non-degreed programs.
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions.
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program.
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location.