What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Software Engineer position at Realtor.com?
Description
At Realtor.com, we are building products that empower millions of home buyers, renters, and real estate professionals. Our mission is to simplify the home buying/selling process and help more people achieve the dream of home ownership. We are looking for a collaborative and customer-focused Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our Video Platform team. This team is building a new way for people to experience homes, using generative AI to turn listing photos into cinematic property walkthroughs and placing them in a feed consumers scroll to explore homes and neighborhoods the way they explore everything else. It is a new surface for the industry and it is early, so the engineers who join now will shape what it becomes.
We believe in leveraging the best tools to solve problems faster. You will be expected to use AI coding assistants and LLMs proficiently in your daily workflow, and to apply the critical judgment needed to verify their output for security, performance, and accuracy, so your time goes to high-impact engineering work.
What You’ll Do:
- Lead the design and delivery of the complex parts of the problem space in your squad, where the requirements are not settled yet.
- Provide guidance to the team on system architecture and design across our GraphQL service and the video generation pipeline.
- Develop solutions that are high quality, scalable, and reliable, from the API and data model through the asynchronous jobs that generate and publish video.
- Work collaboratively in squads composed of Product Managers, Designers, Analysts, and Engineers.
- Mentor engineers on the team and help them grow.
- Investigate and prototype new models, tools, and techniques to introduce new innovations, in a space where the state of the art changes every few months.
- Be self-directed, take initiative, and drive toward solutions with little guidance.
What You'll Bring:
- 5 years of professional software development experience and 2 years of experience contributing to system architecture and design.
- Backend Expertise: Proficiency in modern distributed languages, primarily Java and Python here, with TypeScript, Rust, or Go a plus. Solid Spring Boot experience, and enough Python to contribute to the pipeline rather than just read it.
- API Design: Experience with GraphQL as a service author, not only a consumer. Federation experience is a plus.
- Data Modeling: Solid SQL and relational modeling (e.g., Postgres, Aurora), including schema migrations, with exposure to NoSQL stores (e.g., DynamoDB) and caching (e.g., Redis).
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Hands-on AWS experience across S3, SQS, SNS, RDS, and containerized workloads on EKS or 1 ECS, with familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
- Observability Mindset: A focus on maintaining system health through monitoring, logging, and tracing.
- AI Interest: Curiosity or experience integrating generative models into production. Prior work with prompt design, model output validation, or media processing is a plus, but rigor and curiosity matter more than a specific vendor on your resume.
- Clear written communication. A lot of the coordination on this platform happens through design notes and contract documents rather than meetings.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work four or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person, adding richness to our culture and knitting us closer together.
How We Reward You:
Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:
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 degreed and non-degreed programs
- 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
- Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
- Free snacks and refreshments in each office location