Staff SRE Engineer

Austin, Texas, United States

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.

We are seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our newly formed Operations Excellence organization, reporting to the Director, Operations Excellence. This foundational role will shape the reliability, observability, and operational excellence of our platform infrastructure serving millions of users. As a Staff SRE, you will be a technical leader and mentor who establishes best practices, drives architectural decisions, and enables our 600+ engineers to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

You will work on critical platform systems including EKS infrastructure, Skyway (CI/CD), Frontdoor (Tyk API Gateway), Pantheon (Apollo GraphQL Federation), and our observability stack, while establishing chaos engineering practices and driving cost optimization initiatives with measurable ROI.

We believe in leveraging the best tools to solve problems faster. You will be expected to utilize AI coding assistants and LLMs proficiently to accelerate development velocity, generate boilerplate, and troubleshoot complex debugging scenarios. Beyond simple usage, this role requires the critical judgment to verify AI-generated outputs for security, performance, and accuracy. You should be comfortable integrating AI tooling into your daily workflow to eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on high-impact architectural and strategic engineering challenges.

What You'll Do:

Platform Reliability & Infrastructure

  • Design and maintain highly available AWS infrastructure including EKS clusters, Fargate (ECS), and multi-region architectures
  • Own reliability of critical services: Skyway (CI/CD), Frontdoor (Tyk), Pantheon (Apollo GraphQL), and supporting infrastructure
  • Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for Tier 1/2/3 systems; lead architectural reviews for reliability and cost-efficiency
  • Drive adoption of reliability patterns including circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and
    automated failover Observability & Cost Optimization
  • Build comprehensive observability using NewRelic for APM, distributed tracing, metrics, and logging for rapid troubleshooting
  • Create actionable dashboards and alerts that reduce MTTD and MTTR; establish observability standards across teams
  • Analyze infrastructure spend and implement FinOps practices including rightsizing, reserved capacity, and resource lifecycle management
  • Drive cost-conscious architecture decisions and optimize CI/CD spend (CircleCI, Argo CD optimization) Chaos Engineering & Incident Response
  • Design chaos engineering experiments to identify system weaknesses; build frameworks for safe production testing
  • Lead game day exercises and disaster recovery simulations; create runbooks and automation for resilience
  • Participate in on-call rotation for critical systems; lead post-incident reviews and drive systemic improvements
  • Mentor engineers on incident response, communication, and escalation; contribute to System Health Scorecard Technical Leadership
  • Serve as technical leader and mentor for the growing Operations Excellence team; establish SRE principles and culture
  • Partner with Platform Engineering, Quality Engineering, and product teams on reliability initiatives
  • Support security initiatives including AWS Secrets Manager migration and compliance requirements (SOC 2, PCI, GDPR)
  • Contribute to Developer Experience metrics and platform adoption goals 

What You'll Bring:

  • 8+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering with proven track record improving system reliability
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
  • 5+ years hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM) and Kubernetes including multi-cluster management
  • Strong programming skills (Python, Go, or Java) with infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation)
  • Production experience with observability tools (NewRelic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) and distributed systems architecture
  • Experience with CI/CD platforms and GitOps workflows (CircleCI, Argo CD, Jenkins); on-call rotation and high-severity incident response
  • Preferred: Chaos engineering tools, API Gateway technologies (Tyk/Kong), GraphQL
    federation (Apollo), cost optimization initiatives with measurable ROI, FinOps principles

Technical Skills & Qualities: 

  • Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, Fargate, Lambda, VPC, Route53, CloudFront), Kubernetes, Docker, Istio Service Mesh
  • CI/CD & GitOps: Argo CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
  • Observability: NewRelic - APM, distributed tracing, metrics & logging; Splunk - logging
  • IaC & Automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, Kustomize, Python/Go/Bash
  • Platform Services: Tyk Gateway, Apollo GraphQL, AWS Secrets Manager, Vault
  • Incident Management: OpsGenie, PagerDuty, ServiceNow Leadership Qualities
  • Excellent communication with ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
  • Proven mentorship and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and business teams
  • Self-motivated and autonomous with systems thinking mindset focused on long-term sustainability
  • Data-driven decision making with customer-centric approach and empathy for developer experience

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.

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 degree 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.

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