Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Description

Recognized as the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, Realtor.com® has been at the forefront of online real estate for over 25 years, connecting buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance to find their perfect home. Through its robust suite of tools, Realtor.com® not only makes a significant impact on the real estate industry at large, but for consumers, navigating the biggest purchase they will make in their life, by providing a user experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and most of all, easy to make decisions.

Join us on our mission to empower more people to find their way home by breaking barriers to entry, making the right connections, and building confidence through expert guidance.

Staff Software Engineer, Data Ingestion Platform

About the Role:

Join the Data Movement and Transformation team at Realtor.com to architect, scale, and operate the foundational "paved-path" platform used across engineering, analytics, and data science. In this role, you will champion self-service infrastructure spanning real-time streaming, batch ingestion, schema governance, orchestration, and developer tooling.

Rather than building one-off pipelines for individual teams, you will focus on building managed capabilities, reusable SDKs, and automated workflows that make moving data reliable, secure, and effortless at enterprise scale.

What You’ll Do:

Platform Architecture & Core Ingestion

• Design, build, and operate scalable streaming and batch infrastructure leveraging Kafka/MSK, Kafka Connect, Airflow/MWAA, and Snowflake.
• Develop and maintain ingestion APIs, templates, and client libraries (Python, TypeScript, Kotlin).
• Establish robust data contract and governance workflows using Avro and Schema Registry (schema validation, compatibility checks, and lineage).
• Improve data transformation and orchestration patterns across dbt and Airflow, prioritizing reusability, testing, and operational simplicity.

Reliability, Operations & Developer Enablement

• Own end-to-end reliability, latency, observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs), and cost efficiency across data platform services.
• Participate in incident response, deep-dive root cause analyses, and operational support.
• Build internal developer platform (IDP) tooling, documentation, and diagnostics that turn complex data infrastructure into intuitive self-service products.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and set technical standards across teams.

AI-Assisted Platform Engineering

• Design and implement practical agentic workflows and tool-calling AI agents to automate platform operations (e.g., pipeline triage, DAG/dbt scaffolding, schema validation, support queries).
• Implement robust evaluation, grounding, and human-in-the-loop guardrails to safely accelerate developer throughput.

What You’ll Bring:

• 8+ years building distributed backend infrastructure, high-throughput data platforms, or internal developer tooling.
• Deep production experience with Apache Kafka / AWS MSK (partitioning, consumer groups, delivery semantics, performance tuning, and schema evolution).
• Strong hands-on experience with orchestration and ingestion platforms such as Airflow/MWAA, Kafka Connect, Fivetran, Snowflake, or dbt.
• Fluency in Python, TypeScript, Java, or Kotlin, with experience authoring clean APIs, SDKs, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Proven track record designing and operating fault-tolerant distributed systems handling hundreds of millions of events/records per day at scale. Strong hands-on experience running and scaling workloads on containerized infrastructure, particularly Kubernetes.
• Deep experience partnering directly with internal developer, analytics, and product teams to uncover root causes rather than just fulfilling feature requests. Skilled at leading requirement discovery, distinguishing actual underlying user problems from surface-level symptoms, and architecting the right long-term platform solution.
• Experience with serialization formats (Avro, Protobuf), schema registries, and pipeline observability.
• Track record of designing self-service platform tools and practical familiarity with LLM integrations or agentic developer workflows.
• Proven ability to balance architectural tradeoffs, enforce least-privilege security, and collaborate effectively with diverse stakeholder teams.

How We Work:

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

Do the best work of your life at Realtor.com®

Here, you’ll partner with a diverse team of experts as you use leading-edge tech to empower everyone to meet a crucial goal: finding their way home. And you’ll find your way home too. At Realtor.com®, you’ll bring your full self to work as you innovate with speed, serve our consumers, and champion your teammates. In return, we’ll provide you with a warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture; intellectual challenges; and the development opportunities you need to grow.

Diversity is important to us, therefore, Realtor.com® is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, Realtor.com® will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.