Staff Software Engineer at Realtor.com in Austin, Texas, United States

Job description

• Organic search and organic social are two of the most important ways consumers find realtor.com. Behind organic search sits a platform of crawl, indexation, sitemap, structured-data, and rendering systems; behind organic social sits the share experience and the deeplinking and attribution layer (AppsFlyer) that determines whether a shared listing actually lands the recipient on the right page, in-app or on web. Together these span the layers that shape what search engines, social platforms, and end users see across millions of pages and shares.
• We're building a dedicated Organic Growth Engineering team — a platform team that owns the systems, tooling, and reliability behind organic search and organic social.
• As our Technical SEO & Social Lead, you'll be the engineer who understands the whole ecosystem: from structured data on a listing page, to the delivery-layer configuration that governs crawler access, to the deeplink resolution that fires when a listing gets shared — and who can drive fixes across the teams that own those systems.
• You'll set the technical direction for the team, serve as the voice of Organic Growth inside Engineering — advocating for SEO and social-sharing best practices as the technical SME for the channel — and lead the response when organic search or organic social performance is at risk.
• You'll also be the primary technical counterpart to our Organic Growth product partners, including the VP, Organic Growth (SEO/AEO), turning their strategy into platform changes and giving them a clear, data-backed answer on SEO- and sharing-critical proposals.
• Your north star: The goal is clear and the bar is high: become the #1 non-brand destination in organic search and answer engines while building the ultimate property listing sharing experience for real estate.
• On scope: Several systems that affect SEO and social sharing are owned by partner teams, so a lot of this job is understanding how they connect and driving the right owners to the fix. Comfort with ambiguity and strong cross-team influence matter as much here as depth in any one codebase.
• Note for candidates: This is a senior engineering role, not a marketing SEO position. You will write code, own the organic platform infrastructure — spanning SEO, organic social, and listing-share deeplinking — and set technical direction for how realtor.com is crawled, rendered, indexed, and shared at scale. It reports into Engineering.
• It is also an individual-contributor tech lead role, not a management role; you'll partner with an Engineering Manager who owns people and delivery, while you own the technical direction and the hardest technical problems.

Responsibilities

• You're the technical lead for the team that collectively owns the SEO and organic social platform, you're not expected to personally build all of it. You set the technical strategy, go deep on the hardest cross-cutting problems, and make the team successful.
• Set the technical strategy for SEO at scale: the approach to crawl budget, indexation, canonicalization, robots, sitemaps, and rendering across millions of pages, including the QA testing methodology and regression-testing standards that validate changes before they hit production. Define the standards; go hands-on on the highest-leverage problems yourself.
• Set the technical strategy for organic social sharing and deeplinking: own how shared listing links resolve — AppsFlyer link generation, attribution, and in-app vs. web fallback — and define the standards for share-link reliability the way you would for a crawl path.
• Lead SEO and deeplinking incident response: navigate the systems both channels depend on — edge and delivery, bot management, routing, rendering, content services, attribution/MMP infrastructure — to diagnose boundary-crossing issues and drive the right owners to the fix. Own the escalation framework, run the war rooms, and make sure every post-mortem closes the loop into new alerts, gates, and runbooks.
• Own SEO and social-sharing reliability direction: define the SLOs/SLIs and the on-call model with the observability engineer, covering both crawl/indexation health and deeplink resolution/attribution health.
• Own visibility into SEO- and share-impacting change: a single reviewed view of what's shipping that touches organic-critical pages or the share/deeplink path, in partnership with the Organic Growth PMs — including the Director, Organic Growth.
• Own log-file, crawl-budget, and deeplink-performance analysis: set what we look for in crawler behavior (crawl waste, over-crawl patterns, index drift) and in deeplink performance (resolution failure rate, attribution loss, in-app vs. web fallback rate); the observability/data engineer builds the pipelines that surface it.
• Raise the technical bar — set engineering standards, lead design reviews, and mentor the engineers on the team through the work rather than through a reporting line.
• You'll partner closely with the Organic Growth product team, who owns the product roadmap, KPIs, and business accountability for both the SEO/AEO and organic social channels. They set the "what and why"; you set the "how" on the platform underneath it.

Requirements

• Experience with federated GraphQL and API gateway architectures, and with CDN, WAF, and bot-management layers.
• Familiarity with search engine indexing APIs, and with dynamic-rendering or prerender approaches.
• Direct experience with AppsFlyer (or Branch/Adjust) SDK integration, OneLink/deferred deep linking, and attribution reconciliation.
• Experience defining SLOs and 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; able to debug hydration and crawler-rendering issues.
• Data/analysis skills: SQL against a cloud data warehouse for log-file, crawl-budget, and deeplink-performance analysis.
• CI/CD and automation: you've built or owned regression gates / automated quality checks in a delivery pipeline.
• Cross-team technical leadership as an IC: proven ability to drive fixes and influence design across teams you don't own, without positional authority, and to act as a calm incident commander.
• AI-assisted engineering: you work fluently with AI coding assistants on production code and can tell when their output is wrong.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience, plus 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience owning technical SEO or crawl/rendering infrastructure. Experience with deeplinking/attribution infrastructure is a strong plus even without an SEO background*.*
• Deep technical-SEO engineering expertise: demonstrable ownership of crawl budget, indexation, structured data, rendering, and site migrations at scale (ideally high-traffic marketplace or content sites).
• Deeplinking and attribution expertise: hands-on experience with mobile measurement partners (AppsFlyer or equivalent — Branch, Adjust), deep-link generation, resolution, and attribution debugging.

Skills

Required

• CDN, WAF, and bot-management layers
• Search engine indexing APIs
• OneLink/deferred deep linking
• Attribution reconciliation
• SLOs and real-time alerting
• Python
• JavaScript/TypeScript (Node)
• React/Next.js
• SSR/SSG/ISR/CSR
• SQL against cloud data warehouse
• CI/CD and automation
• Cross-team technical leadership as an IC

Preferred

• Deep technical-SEO engineering expertise

Benefits

• 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®