Staff Software Engineer, Recommender Systems

Are you ready to take a leading technical role, driving architecture and design decisions across multiple teams? As a Staff Software Engineer for Recommender Systems at Realtor.com® , you'll lead the development of critical backend services and recommender systems, impacting millions of users. You will focus on building scalable, high-performance applications, integrating machine learning models, and driving innovation within our engineering teams. Work with cutting-edge technologies like AWS, Elasticsearch, GenAI, and Node.js to deliver exceptional experiences for our users.

Three Reasons Why to Apply

• Help build our next-gen Personalization Platform with the cutting-edge technologies
• Contribute to improving recommendations for millions of users
• Gain hands-on experience with large-scale Recommendation system

What you'll do:

• Serve as a technical lead for key projects, focusing on the architecture and development of scalable backend services and recommender systems functionalities leading cross-squad projects and partnering with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
• Develop AI-native services
• Design, build, and optimize high-performance recommender systems, ensuring relevance, accuracy, and speed for millions of users.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and implement solutions that drive product innovation, scalability, and performance.
• Own the design and development of complex features, including data pipelines and the integration of advanced machine learning models into the recommender systems and personalize user experience across web and mobile.
• Drive performance optimizations for services, ensuring low-latency and high availability.
• Mentor and coach engineers, guiding them on best practices, technical problem-solving, and search technologies.
• Contribute to the technical roadmap and long-term architecture vision, driving innovation and reducing technical debt.
• Play a critical role in hiring and developing engineering talent, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

How we work:

We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work three 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

What you'll bring:

• A highly skilled software engineer with extensive experience in building scalable solutions and backend services.
• 7+ years of software development experience, with specific expertise in recommender systems.
• Proven ability to lead teams in delivering complex features while ensuring high quality and scalability.
• Experience with LLM, RAG, and other Gen-AI experience is a huge plus 
• Experience with XGBoost, two tower recommender systems a plus.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, capable of interacting effectively with product managers, stakeholders, and other engineers and driving orgwide technical vision.
• Experience with cloud-based architectures and services, particularly AWS (Lambda, EC2, S3, etc.) and k8s.
• Proficient in designing and implementing data pipelines, and integrating machine learning models into production user facing applications.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent professional experience.

How we Reward you:

Realtor.com®  is committed to investing in the health and well-being 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