Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Location: Austin, TX, United States

Category: Technology

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 Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our newly formed Operations and Enablement organization, reporting to the Sr Manager of Operations and Enablement team. This role will contribute to the reliability, observability, and operational excellence of our platform infrastructure serving millions of users. As a Staff SRE, you will be a strong technical contributor who implements best practices, solves complex problems, and enables our 200+ engineers to deliver exceptional customer experiences across our web and native application surfaces. You will work on critical platform systems including EKS infrastructure, Skyway (CI/CD), Frontdoor (Tyk API Gateway), Pantheon (Apollo GraphQL Federation), and our observability stack

What You’ll Do:

Platform Reliability & Infrastructure

• Implement and maintain highly available AWS infrastructure including EKS clusters, Fargate (ECS), and multi-region architectures
• Support reliability of critical services: Skyway (CI/CD), Frontdoor (Tyk), Pantheon (Apollo GraphQL), and supporting infrastructure
• Monitor SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for Tier 1/2/3 systems; participate in architectural reviews for reliability and cost-efficiency
• Implement reliability patterns including circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and automated failover

Observability & Cost Optimization

• Implement observability solutions using NewRelic for APM, distributed tracing, metrics, and logging for rapid troubleshooting
• Build dashboards and alerts that reduce MTTD and MTTR; contribute to observability standards across teams
• Identify infrastructure cost optimization opportunities and implement FinOps practices including rightsizing and resource lifecycle management
• Support cost-conscious architecture decisions and CI/CD spend optimization (CircleCI, Argo CD)
• Build IaC templates for reusability

Chaos Engineering & Incident Response

• Execute chaos engineering experiments to identify system weaknesses; contribute to frameworks for safe production testing
• Participate in game day exercises and disaster recovery simulations; create runbooks and automation for resilience
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical systems; conduct post-incident reviews and implement improvements

Technical Contribution

• Contribute as a strong technical individual contributor to the Observability Enablement team
• Collaborate with Platform Engineering, Quality Engineering, and product teams on reliability initiatives
• Contribute to Developer Experience metrics and platform adoption goals
• Provide technical guidance to junior team members

What You’ll Bring:

• 8+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering with demonstrated success improving system reliability
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM) and Kubernetes including cluster management
• Proficient programming skills (Python, Go, or Java) with infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Production experience with observability tools (NewRelic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) and distributed systems
• Experience with CI/CD platforms and GitOps workflows (CircleCI, Argo CD, Jenkins); on-call rotation and incident response
• Preferred: Exposure to chaos engineering tools, API Gateway technologies (Tyk/Kong), GraphQL federation (Apollo), cost optimization initiatives, FinOps principles
• Technical Skills
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, Fargate, Lambda, VPC, Route53, CloudFront), Kubernetes, Docker, Istio Service Mesh
• CI/CD & GitOps: Argo CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
• Observability: NewRelic - APM, distributed tracing, metrics & logging; Splunk - logging
• IaC & Automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, Kustomize, Python/Go/Bash
• Platform Services: Tyk Gateway, Apollo GraphQL, AWS Secrets Manager, Vault
• Incident Management: OpsGenie, PagerDuty, ServiceNow
• Professional Qualities
• Strong communication skills with ability to explain technical concepts to diverse audiences
• Collaborative approach working across engineering, product, and business teams
• Self-motivated with ability to solve complex problems within established practices and policies
• Data-driven decision making with customer-centric approach and empathy for developer experience

How We Work:

We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work four 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.