Senior Software Engineer

About The RoleThe RealReal is looking for a highly experienced and self-motivated Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack) to join our Growth team. Working closely with Product partners and Engineering management, you will build technical solutions enhancing The RealReal’s on-platform experiences, helping the business acquire and activate high value customers. You will also work closely with Marketing and other business stakeholders to help build seamless and engaging customer journeys that optimize our marketing effectiveness.
Our awesome team of friendly humans is located in multiple time zones throughout North and South America. Our team values growth and personal development; The RealReal is a great place to develop your professional software and leadership skills.
As a Senior Software Engineer you will be an active hands-on contributor as well as an influencer for our technical direction. You will be able to contribute to various initiatives as well as provide feedback through code reviews and pairing. We are especially excited about you if you are enthusiastic about working in the luxury retail/e-commerce space or if you are passionate about our mission of sustainability in creating a circular economy for high-end goods.
This role reports to the Engineering Manager of Growth and will be fully remote.
[Item]
The RealReal is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Item Domain team within Sales & Retail (Pricing, Pay, and Merch Tools). Item sits in the middle of the luxury resale catalog: enrichment, configuration, and trustworthy product data that power search, PDPs, and operator tooling.
In this role, you will build backend services and internal web applications that help consignors' items get listed, enriched, and merchandised accurately and efficiently. You will partner closely with product, design, and engineering leadership, own meaningful slices of work end to end, and help shape the technical direction of systems that are critical to the item lifecycle.

What You Get To Do Every Day

• Design, build, and ship backend services and internal tooling for item creation, enrichment, configuration, listing, and merchandising workflows used by operators and shoppers.

• Produce high-quality, performant, secure, and testable code that contributes to company-wide initiatives; handle data in accordance with company policy.

• Develop across our stack, including JVM (Java, Kotlin), Elixir, Ruby, React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Kafka, AWS/Lambda, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and related tooling.

• Own medium-to-large features or services end to end so teammates can understand, operate, and extend what you ship.

• Influence technical decisions on architecture, standards, and delivery for the systems your team owns.

• Review pull requests and provide constructive feedback; pair with teammates and support onboarding when needed.

• Deploy user-facing and operator-facing code to production responsibly.

• Partner with product, engineering management, and stakeholders to clarify ambiguity and balance customer needs with technical constraints.

• Improve reliability and maintainability over time by using metrics and incidents to learn, strengthening observability, and leaving systems easier to run than you found them.

• Continuously learn, whether a new design pattern, part of the stack, or initiative that moves the company forward.

What You Bring To The Role

Minimum Requirements:

• 3-5+ years of software engineering experience.

• Strong communication skills with product, stakeholders, and engineering peers; able to clarify incomplete requirements.

• Experience building production-ready web applications and backend systems with reliability and security in mind.

• Passion for testing practices and continuous improvement; observability-minded delivery.

• Experience influencing technical direction (architecture, standards, delivery), not only executing predefined tasks.

• Experience with Java, Kotlin, Elixir, Erlang, Ruby, JavaScript, Next.js, or another programming language; ready to work on JVM services (Java, Kotlin) when assignments require it.

• Familiarity with common engineering tools such as IDEs, RESTful APIs, Git repositories, TypeScript, version control software, and remote deployment tools.

• Familiarity with event-based architectures, event streaming (for example Kafka), database fundamentals, and GraphQL or comparable APIs.

• Comfort working with complex, contextual domain data (rules and validations that vary by category or context) and integrating with neighboring services.

• Understanding of reusable components / building component libraries when the role includes UI work.

• Bachelor of Computer Science degree or equivalent experience.

• Enthusiasm for solving problems for users and operators with technology; uses data and business context where it helps.

Preferred Requirements:

• Production experience with JVM services (Java, Kotlin), including common frameworks and tooling, and/or web applications using JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and React.

• Experience integrating LLMs or managed AI APIs into backend or internal tooling (for example enrichment, classification, attribution, or human-in-the-loop review).

• Experience building microservices integrated with neighboring teams or shared platforms.

• Experience building eCommerce or marketplace platforms.

• Experience with dashboards, monitoring, or incident response in production.

• Experience with Python as production backend work alongside JVM or service-oriented systems

Compensation, Benefits, + Perks

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• 401K with Company Match

• Medical, Dental & Vision Insurance

• Paid Parental Leave

• 9 Paid Company Holidays

• Flexible Time Off (With Manager Approval)

• Find out more about our Benefits here.

The expected salary range for this role is $151,068.00-$188,835.00. To determine starting pay we carefully consider a variety of factors, including primary work location and an evaluation of a candidate’s skills, experience, market demands, and internal parity. Additionally, salary is just one component of TRR’s total rewards package. Depending on role, employees may also be eligible for a bonus program, incentive pay and benefits.

The RealReal is the world’s largest online marketplace for authenticated, resale luxury goods, with 40 million members. With a rigorous authentication process overseen by experts, The RealReal provides a safe and reliable platform for consumers to buy and sell their luxury items. We have hundreds of in-house gemologists, horologists, and brand authenticators who inspect thousands of items each day. As a sustainable company, we give new life to pieces by thousands of brands across numerous categories—including women's and men's fashion, fine jewelry and watches, art, and home—in support of the circular economy. We make selling effortless with free virtual appointments, in-home pickup, drop-off, and direct shipping. We handle all of the work for consignors, including authenticating, using AI and machine learning to determine optimal pricing, photographing and listing their items, as well as shipping and customer service. 

The RealReal is committed to providing an equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, or Veteran status. We will consider qualified applicants for a position regardless of arrest or conviction records. At TRR, People Come First. That’s why diversity and inclusion are vital to our priorities as an equal opportunity employer. You can read about our Diversity Equity and Inclusion program here.
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The employee is regularly required to sit; use hands to finger, handle, or feel and talk or hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; reach with hands and arms; climb or balance; stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl; and taste or smell. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision. The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.