Sr. Backend Software 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 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.

Who We Are

At Realtor.com®, we’re on a mission to make buying, selling, and living in homes easier and more rewarding for everyone, serving tens of millions of consumers each month across our web and mobile experiences.

The Notifications team sits within the Consumer and owns the centralized notification platform that powers relevant, timely, and valuable communications to our consumers across push and email channels. 

Our stack includes Kafka, AWS EKS and Lambda, SQS, MongoDB, Redis, AWS Secrets Manager, and Serverless, with a strong focus on observability, cost efficiency, and operational excellence.

About The Role

We are looking for a Sr. Backend Software Engineer to join the Notifications team and help design, build, and operate the next generation of our notification platform.

In this role, you will:

  • Own core backend services that power notification preferences, home alerts, and notification delivery for initiatives like Project Columbus (Updated Notification Preferences and Alerts by Geo).
  • Work across event-driven architectures, real-time delivery pipelines, and storage systems that serve notification history and campaign traffic at scale.
  • Partner closely with CRM Marketing, Search, Mobile teams to deliver reliable, observable, and cost‑efficient notification experiences.

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

Design, Build, and Operate Backend Services

  • Design and implement scalable backend services and APIs for notification preferences, notification delivery, and notification storage, using modern backend languages and frameworks (e.g., Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, or Python) on AWS.
  • Extend and evolve our event-driven architecture for notifications, leveraging Kafka, SQS, and AWS services to reduce latency and improve reliability for push and email sends.
  • Build and maintain data models and storage layers (e.g., MongoDB Atlas, Redis) to support high-volume reads/writes, notification history, and preference lookups at scale.
  • Implement and harden CI/CD pipelines on our paved path (CircleCI, GitHub, Argo) to enable safe, frequent deployments with strong automated test coverage.

Reliability, Observability, and Operational Excellence

  • Own the health of the services you build, including metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerts using tools like New Relic and Splunk, and participate in an on‑call rotation for Notifications services (Pigeon, Notification Center, Preferences APIs, and pipelines).
  • Improve system reliability and performance by driving projects to simplify architectures (e.g., replatforming Pigeon to an event‑driven model, improving DLQ handling, and replacing legacy step functions and throttlers with SQS consumers).
  • Contribute to cost and resiliency initiatives, including logging/CloudWatch optimization, secrets migration to AWS Secrets Manager/Skyway Vault, and scaling strategies for notification databases and infrastructure.
  • Author and maintain runbooks and operational playbooks for on‑call responders, covering incident response, rollbacks, backfills, and replay strategies for notification workloads.

Cross‑Team Collaboration and Delivery

  • Partner with CRM Marketing and Product to translate business requirements for campaigns, alerts, and notification preferences into robust technical designs and incremental delivery plans.
  • Collaborate with Search, CPS, Identity, Orchestration, and Data teams to ensure notification flows (e.g., Alerts by Geo, saved search alerts, preference syncs) are correct, observable, and performant end‑to‑end.
  • Participate in and lead technical design discussions, documenting trade‑offs and making recommendations that balance delivery speed, reliability, and total cost of ownership.
  • Contribute to team rituals (planning, grooming, retros, incident reviews), helping to de‑risk projects via spikes/POCs, clear recommendations, and proactive communication on risks and timelines.

Engineering Excellence and Mentorship

  • Write clear, maintainable, and well‑tested code, and participate actively in code reviews to raise the bar on quality, security, and performance.
  • Mentor and support other engineers on the team through pairing, design reviews, and feedback, especially around backend design, observability, and operational discipline.
  • Contribute to shared standards for Notifications and Consumer (patterns, libraries, templates, and best practices) to reduce friction and improve consistency across services.

What You’ll Bring

Core Qualifications

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend systems and distributed services in production environments.
  • Experience with TypeScript/JavaScript/Node.js. 
  • Proficiency in at least one modern backend language such as Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, or Python, and a track record of building secure, testable, maintainable services and APIs.
  • Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka/MSK, SQS), including designing resilient producers/consumers and handling retries, DLQs, and backfills.
  • Hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., Lambda, ECS/EKS, S3, API Gateway, IAM, SQS) and Infrastructure‑as‑Code frameworks (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform, or similar).
  • Experience with NoSQL and cache technologies such as MongoDB Atlas and Redis (or comparable systems), including schema design and performance tuning for high‑volume workloads.
  • Strong CI/CD and testing mindset, including building and extending pipelines (e.g., CircleCI + GitHub + Argo), and applying unit, integration, and contract testing to services and data flows.
  • Solid observability skills, using tools such as New Relic and Splunk (or equivalents) to define SLIs/SLOs, build dashboards, and reduce mean time to detection and recovery.
  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work closely with product, marketing, analytics, and other engineering teams, and to communicate clearly about risks, trade‑offs, and timelines.
  • Ability to operate in an on‑call rotation in US time zones, owning production incidents end‑to‑end and driving follow‑up improvements.
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Have

  • Experience with notifications, messaging, or campaign delivery systems (push, email, in‑app notifications), including rate limiting, preference management, and history storage.
  • Experience with CRM and marketing platforms such as Braze, Cordial, Hightouch, or similar activation tools, and integrations between internal data platforms and external providers.
  • Background in real‑time personalization or alerts (e.g., saved searches, alerts by geo, behavioral triggers) where correctness, latency, and relevance are critical.
  • Familiarity with security and compliance practices, including secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager, Skyway Vault), AppID tagging, and cloud cost/usage governance.
  • Experience contributing to tech modernization and platform re‑architecture efforts (e.g., migrating serverless workflows to EKS‑based services, improving throughput and state recovery for high‑volume pipelines).
How We Work:
We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. Our employees work three days in our Austin headquarters 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.

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