Job Specifications
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.
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.
What You’ll Bring
Core Qualifications
5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend systems and distributed services i