Software Eng, Sr Staff - DevOps

Job Description

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 are seeking a Senior Staff DevOps Engineer to join our CI/CD Platform team. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape the shared delivery and infrastructure capabilities used by engineering across Realtor.com®. You will serve as a principal technical anchor for our CI/CD ecosystem and cloud-native runtime platforms, helping define the architectural patterns, engineering standards, and operating practices that enable teams to deliver software safely and efficiently.

This role combines deep hands-on engineering with broad technical leadership. You will help scale AWS and Kubernetes platforms, standardize enterprise CI/CD and GitOps workflows, strengthen service-mesh architecture, and build paved paths that allow product teams to deploy securely without becoming infrastructure experts. The role requires strong technical judgment and the ability to influence architecture and adoption across teams without relying on formal authority.

We believe in leveraging the best tools to solve problems faster. You will be expected to use AI coding assistants and LLMs thoughtfully to accelerate development, generate boilerplate, investigate complex failures, and improve documentation. You will also apply sound judgment to verify AI-generated output for security, performance, reliability, and accuracy.

What you’ll do

Cross-Organization Platform Architecture

- Own the technical architecture and long-term design patterns for a self-service CI/CD platform and cloud-native runtime environments used across engineering.

- Define practical standards for delivery, infrastructure, reliability, and platform operations while balancing developer autonomy with appropriate guardrails.

- Lead architecture reviews, author clear RFCs, and build alignment across Engineering, Security, and Infrastructure partners.

- Use operational data, developer feedback, and business priorities to sequence platform investments that improve delivery velocity, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.

Production AWS, Kubernetes & Service Mesh

- Serve as the final escalation point and design authority for production AWS EKS environments spanning multiple clusters and regions.

- Define resilient cluster, networking, scaling, workload-placement, and disaster-recovery strategies for highly available containerized systems.

- Architect and evolve Istio service-mesh patterns for secure service-to-service communication, mTLS, traffic routing, ingress and egress gateways, canary releases, and circuit breaking.

- Guide the resolution of complex failures involving Kubernetes control planes, service-mesh data planes, networking, deployments, and distributed systems.

CI/CD, GitOps & Developer Experience

- Standardize and improve enterprise CircleCI and GitOps workflows using reusable templates, ArgoCD patterns, and self-service delivery capabilities.

- Abstract infrastructure complexity so product teams can build, test, and deploy securely and consistently across environments.

- Build internal tooling, Kubernetes operators, Terraform modules, and automation that remove systemic toil and technical debt.

- Establish feedback loops with engineering teams to measure adoption, identify friction, and continuously improve the platform experience.

Security, Policy & FinOps

- Design policy and security controls across infrastructure, pipelines, and runtime environments using OPA, Kyverno, IRSA, Network Policies, secrets management, and related approaches.

- Build automated controls for compliance, vulnerability management, cloud governance, and secure software delivery.

- Partner with Engineering, Security, and Finance to improve resource efficiency and implement cost-aware Kubernetes scaling and cloud operations.

- Ensure platform decisions account for security, resilience, performance, developer experience, and total cost of ownership.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

- Mentor Senior and Staff DevOps engineers and help raise the technical bar across the organization.

- Influence teams through credibility, clear communication, thoughtful standards, and partnership rather than hierarchy.

- Lead through ambiguity, make tradeoffs explicit, and create durable systems and practices that scale beyond your immediate team.

What you’ll bring

Experience & Expertise

- 10+ years of experience in infrastructure automation, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or distributed systems.

- 5+ years of hands-on experience building, hardening, and troubleshooting production Amazon EKS environments across complex multi-cluster or multi-region topologies.

- 3+ years of deep experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting Istio or a comparable service-mesh platform, including traffic management and ingress and egress patterns.

- Demonstrated experience leading technical initiatives across a large engineering organization, including experience influencing organizations of 200+ engineers and teams outside your immediate reporting structure.

- Proven experience defining standards, building reusable platform capabilities, and driving adoption through practical developer enablement.

Technical Skills

- Cloud and infrastructure: AWS, Amazon EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, networking, Kubernetes, Docker, and Helm.

- CI/CD and GitOps: CircleCI, ArgoCD, GitOps workflows, reusable pipeline templates, deployment automation, and release strategies.

- Service mesh and reliability: Istio, Envoy, mTLS, traffic routing, canary releases, circuit breaking, observability, and distributed-systems troubleshooting.

- Security and policy: IRSA, Kubernetes Network Policies, OPA or Kyverno, secrets management, vulnerability management, and secure supply-chain practices.

- Infrastructure automation: Terraform, Python or Go, Kubernetes operators, platform scripting, and internal developer tooling.

- Cost and operations: Karpenter or comparable Kubernetes autoscaling, FinOps principles, capacity planning, incident response, and operational excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with CircleCI in a large-scale production environment.

- Experience operating multi-cluster Istio service meshes and Kubernetes networking at scale.

- Certifications such as CKA, CKS, or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional.

- Experience supporting multi-cloud environments or migration programs involving Google Cloud Platform and GKE.

Professional Qualities

-
Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical decisions to diverse audiences.

-
A collaborative, low-ego approach to architecture, standards, and cross-team problem solving.

-
Strong systems thinking and judgment across reliability, security, performance, cost, and developer experience.

-
Comfortable staying hands-on while operating with broad organizational influence.

-
Self-motivated, pragmatic, and able to create clarity and momentum in ambiguous environments.

How We Work:
We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work three or more days in our offices, 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.