Senior Principal Engineer

About the Role

What You’ll Do

• Help define Realtor.com’s target architecture and multi-year technology strategy across web, mobile, search, APIs, identity, data, machine learning, AI, and developer platforms.
• Translate business and product priorities into scalable, secure, and practical technical roadmaps.
• Identify architectural risks, platform gaps, modernization opportunities, and areas of unnecessary complexity.
• Establish lightweight standards and reference architectures that improve consistency without slowing teams down.
• Advise senior engineering and product leaders on major technology investments and build-versus-buy decisions.

• Provide technical leadership for high-impact programs spanning multiple products, platforms, and engineering organizations.
• Define end-to-end architectures, key interfaces, decision points, and implementation paths.
• Remain engaged from technical discovery through delivery, rollout, and operational adoption.
• Step into critical incidents, performance issues, security concerns, or architectural escalations where senior technical judgment is required.
• Drive alignment when requirements are ambiguous or ownership is distributed across teams.

• Provide architectural leadership for large-scale search, ranking, recommendations, personalization, and location-based experiences.
• Guide the design of data pipelines, feature platforms, model-serving systems, experimentation frameworks, and real-time decisioning capabilities.
• Partner with product, data science, machine learning, and engineering teams to move models reliably from experimentation into production.
• Establish patterns for model evaluation, observability, explainability, cost management, privacy, and responsible AI.
• Help evolve search and ML platforms that improve relevance, engagement, conversion, and customer trust.

• Guide architecture across APIs, distributed services, event-driven systems, identity, cloud infrastructure, and shared platforms.
• Improve service boundaries, data ownership, observability, resilience, scalability, and failure isolation.
• Partner with security teams to embed security, privacy, and compliance into system design.
• Strengthen service-level objectives, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and incident readiness.
• Turn recurring operational issues into durable architectural improvements rather than repeated tactical fixes.

• Mentor Principal Engineers, Staff Engineers, architects, engineering managers, and emerging technical leaders.
• Raise the quality of design reviews, technical proposals, architecture decisions, incident analysis, and engineering documentation.
• Build alignment across teams through technical forums, reference implementations, and shared engineering practices.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to executives, product leaders, and engineering teams.
• Influence through evidence, clarity, trust, and strong technical credibility rather than positional authority.

What You’ll Bring

• Extensive software engineering experience (15+ years), including leadership as a Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect, or equivalent senior technical role.
• A proven record of shaping architecture across large, complex, high-scale engineering organizations.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, APIs, data systems, observability, security, and reliability engineering.
• Strong knowledge of search systems, ranking, recommendations, personalization, and high-volume data platforms.
• Experience building and operating machine learning or generative AI systems in production.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple organizations without direct authority.
• Strong judgment in balancing speed, customer value, operational risk, cost, and long-term architectural health.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• A history of mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards across an organization.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• 15+ years of related experience 

Success in This Role

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 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