At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.
About the Role:
The Search Backend team is at the heart of the Compass Engineering organization, driving the search capabilities across our suite of real estate tools. This team is responsible for ingesting listing data and providing it through REST APIs that serve various front-end components on our website and mobile apps, as well as other Backend services which rely on listing search results. Their work encompasses everything from finding and paginating listings to sorting, clustering, and boosting search results, both in list and map views.
We're creating a cutting-edge platform to introduce numerous game-changing products and features for real estate agents. Joining the Search Backend team means playing a pivotal role in enhancing an already impressive product. You'll contribute to platform development, improving search quality, enhancing accuracy, boosting performance, and optimizing costs.
As an engineer on the Search Backend team, you’ll work on both infrastructure-focused and product-facing projects. You’ll contribute to areas like real-time search APIs, relevance tuning, and interactive map-based search experiences. The ideal candidate combines backend engineering depth with curiosity about the product experience.
At Compass, You Will:
- Build, develop, and scale the platform that empowers real estate professionals, buyers, and sellers.
- Become a domain expert in real estate technology, serving as an empathetic partner to our customers.
- Optimize performance and cost of listing ingestion and retrieval pipelines.
- Collaborate cross-functionally to build new search experiences across mobile and web.
- Inspire, recruit, and mentor fellow engineers, and contribute to a culture of technical excellence and learning.
- Operate within a scalable engineering culture that leverages modern principles of distributed systems and automated CI/CD/testing/monitoring to drive efficiency.
What We Look For:
- BS or MS in CS or EE, or equivalent.
- A track record as a technical leader with teamwide impact.
- 4+ years of experience developing comprehensive, well-tested, and high-performance search applications.
- 4+ years of programming experience in languages such as Java, Python, and Go (we utilize all three at Compass).
- Experience designing and extending large-scale search systems, including RESTful APIs, microservice architectures, data ingestion methods, and search methodologies.
- Experience in fine-tuning performance and using data to optimize end-to-end latency and system behavior.
- Understanding and adherence to industry-standard best practices in software development and architecture.
- In-depth knowledge and hands-on experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
- Familiarity with AWS services, including Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, EKS, S3, Redis, Lambda, and MSK.
If you're passionate about shaping the future of real estate technology and possess the skills and experience we're seeking, we encourage you to join our dynamic team at Compass. Together, we'll continue to transform the industry.
Compensation: The base pay range for this position is $111,000-$167,000; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of benefits. Base pay is based on market location. Minimum wage for the position will always be met.
Perks that You Need to Know About:
Participation in our incentive programs (which may include eligible cash, equity, or commissions). Plus paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave; medical, tele-health, dental and vision benefits; 401(k) plan; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); commuter program; life and disability insurance; Maven (a support system for new parents); Carrot (fertility benefits); UrbanSitter (caregiver referral network); Employee Assistance Program; and pet insurance.
Notice for California Applicants
Los Angeles County Fair Chance Notice
Top Skills
What We Do
A real estate company with a purpose; we are building the first modern real estate platform, pairing the industry’s top talent with technology to make the search and sell experience intelligent and seamless.
Why Work With Us
We are a tech company reinventing the space.
To lead the industry requires the smartest tools built by the brightest minds across engineering, design, and strategy. Through our proprietary platform, Compass is changing how agents and clients navigate the process of finding or selling a home. Join our team today!









