Staff Software Engineer

Realtor.com’s Organic Growth Engineering team builds the platform systems that help organic search performance and organic social sharing work reliably at scale. In this Staff Software Engineer role, you’ll set the technical direction behind crawl, indexing, rendering, and AppsFlyer-powered share-link and deeplink attribution, with hands-on ownership of how these pieces stay healthy in production. The team operates with in-person collaboration as a core part of how work gets done, and you’ll have support benefits designed for real life, including medical coverage, family forming benefits, flexible time off, and financial planning resources.

What you’ll do

• Define the technical strategy for SEO at scale, including crawl budget approach, indexation behavior, canonicalization, robots handling, sitemaps, and rendering across millions of pages. Set QA testing and regression-testing standards to validate changes before production.
• Own the technical strategy for organic social sharing and deeplinking, including how shared listing links resolve. Cover AppsFlyer link generation, attribution, and in-app vs. web fallback, and establish reliability standards for share-link resolution.
• Lead SEO and deeplinking incident response by diagnosing cross-system issues spanning edge and delivery, bot management, routing, rendering, content services, and attribution/MMP infrastructure. Drive the right owners to resolution.
• Run an escalation framework, facilitate war rooms, and ensure each post-mortem results in follow-through such as new alerts, gates, and runbooks.
• Set SLOs/SLIs and align the on-call model with the observability engineer for both crawl/indexation health and deeplink resolution/attribution health.
• Maintain a reviewed view of what ships that can affect organic-critical pages or the share/deeplink path, partnering with Organic Growth product stakeholders, including the Director, Organic Growth.
• Own performance and reliability analysis for log files, crawl budget, and deeplink performance. Define what to measure in crawler behavior (crawl waste, over-crawl patterns, index drift) and in deeplink outcomes (resolution failure rate, attribution loss, and in-app vs. web fallback rate). Work with the observability/data engineer on pipelines to surface these signals.
• Raise engineering standards by leading design reviews and mentoring engineers through the work rather than through a reporting line.
• Partner with the Organic Growth product team that owns the roadmap, KPIs, and business accountability for SEO/AEO and organic social channels. You focus on how the platform underneath delivers on the product goals.
• Serve as the technical lead for the team’s collective ownership of the SEO and organic social platform. You’re not expected to personally build all components, but you will lead the hardest cross-cutting problems.

What you bring

• Experience with federated GraphQL and API gateway architectures, plus familiarity with CDN, WAF, and bot-management layers.
• Familiarity with search engine indexing APIs and dynamic rendering or prerender approaches.
• Direct experience integrating AppsFlyer (or Branch/Adjust) SDKs, including OneLink/deferred deep linking and attribution reconciliation.
• Experience defining SLOs and implementing real-time alerting for a customer-facing platform.
• Prior experience standing up or re-platforming an SEO engineering function.
• Strong backend engineering: proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript (Node), comfortable owning production services.
• Rendering fluency: hands-on with React/Next.js and the SEO implications of SSR/SSG/ISR/CSR, including debugging hydration and crawler-rendering issues.
• Data and analysis skills: SQL against a cloud data warehouse for log-file, crawl-budget, and deeplink-performance analysis.
• CI/CD and automation: experience building or owning regression gates and automated quality checks in a delivery pipeline.
• Cross-team technical leadership as an IC, influencing fixes and design decisions across teams without positional authority, and serving as a calm incident commander.
• AI-assisted engineering: able to work fluently with AI coding assistants on production code and detect incorrect outputs.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (or equivalent experience) plus 8+ years of software engineering experience, including ownership of technical SEO or crawl/rendering infrastructure.
• Deeplinking and attribution infrastructure experience is a strong plus, even without an SEO background.

Benefits

• 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

Role logistics

This role is onsite in Austin, TX. It is hybrid, and you’ll need to be within commutable distance. The company balances creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration, with employees working three or more days in the office.

Technologies you’ll work with

• GraphQL, API gateway
• CDN, WAF, bot-management
• AppsFlyer, Branch, Adjust, OneLink, deferred deep linking
• Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node
• React, Next.js; SSR, SSG, ISR, CSR
• SQL, cloud data warehouse
• AI coding assistants