Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer at Realtor.com®, you are a technical leader focusing on ambiguous problems. You understand the long-term business needs and impacts of technology decisions. As part of the Core Leads team, you help facilitate individuals' home journeys by aligning them with real estate partners, including Buyer's Agents. Your direct impact will drive the achievement of critical OKRs.

Staff Software Engineers at Realtor.com® help guide the team in making the right trade-offs between short-term requirements and long-term business/operational success. You provide a system-wide view and design guidance, influence decisions across teams, and advocate for re-use where possible. You collaborate on project ideas with Product Management and engage with customers, stakeholders, and peers while mentoring through code reviews, design discussions, and team planning.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery for ambiguous and complex problem spaces within the squad.
• Provide guidance on system architecture and design to the team and across teams.
• Develop high-quality, scalable, and reliable solutions.
• Work collaboratively in squads composed of Product Managers, Designers, Analysts, and Engineers.
• Mentor and develop a team of engineers.
• Investigate and prototype technologies to introduce new innovations.
• Be self-directed, take initiative, and drive toward solutions with minimal guidance.
• Utilize AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development, generate boilerplate, and troubleshoot complex debugging scenarios while critically verifying outputs for security, performance, and accuracy.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience in software development.
• 3+ years of experience contributing to architecture and design.
• Experience in building software or the ability to learn the Realtor.com® stack, including Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, Numpy, Pandas) and React.
• Experience with database systems and AWS (preferred).
• Experience delivering high value to customers quickly, frequently, with regular feedback and support.
• Strong understanding of system design and trade-offs between design approaches.
• Adherence to software engineering best practices (e.g., testing, code reviews, documentation).

Schedule

Employees work three days per week in the Austin headquarters to foster in-person collaboration.

Benefits

• Inclusive and competitive medical, prescription, dental, and vision coverage.
• Family-forming benefits.
• 13 paid holidays.
• Flexible time off.
• 8 hours of paid volunteer time off.
• Immediate eligibility for a Company 401(k) plan with a 3.5% company match.
• Tuition reimbursement program for degree and non-degree programs.
• 1:1 personalized financial planning sessions.
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program.
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location.