Sr Software Engineer - Platform Data Query

Sr Software Engineer - Platform Data Query Software Engineering locations: San Diego, California; Santa Barbara, California; Dallas, Texas; Remote - Atlanta, GA; Remote - Chicago, IL; Remote - San Francisco, CA; Remote - Washington DC, United States; Remote - Denver, CO. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer in our Platform Data Query team to operate, maintain, scale, and enhance Appfolio's data streaming and data access systems. The role focuses on modern data lake architectures, including Iceberg data lakes, Trino, Apache Flink, and Kafka, and supports customer‑facing dashboards, reports, BI integrations, and AI‑powered agents that serve over 20,000 real‑estate property‑management clients. Responsibilities Build a deep understanding of our data structure and systems to enable maintenance, scaling, and future enhancements. Maintain, optimize, and scale our robust data access layer on top of our Iceberg data lake, owning optimizations such as data compaction for performance and storage efficiency. Design, build, and operate a secure API on top of our data tech stack to integrate downstream applications and platform services. Collaborate with Product to understand operational needs, troubleshoot issues, and design new features or enhancements. Work in an agile manner to turn scaling challenges and feature enhancements into deliverables and execute quickly while limiting work in progress. Maintain a high bar of engineering excellence, adopt best practices, provide and receive in‑depth code reviews, and engage in healthy debate. Ensure data flowing through pipelines is tested with appropriate unit and integration tests. Deliver well‑instrumented queries and dashboards that are accessible and used to drive decisions and measure progress. Participate in a high‑performing, empowered team, taking ownership of your problem space and growing through successes and failures. Operate, optimize, and scale systems responsible for high‑concurrency access to large data sets, with deep knowledge of query optimization in distributed engines like Trino and AWS Athena. Qualifications Experience operating, scaling, and enhancing data pipelines at a company with large data sets using Apache Flink and Kafka, especially with multi‑tenant data in an agile SaaS environment. Foundational experience operating, tuning, and maintaining Iceberg data lakes, with deep knowledge of table maintenance and data compaction strategies. Experience working on platform teams or maintaining platform services for internal teams. Proven experience across all levels of the development stack. Proficiency in object‑oriented languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, or C#. Strong SQL skills and deep knowledge of data access/query optimization at scale using distributed engines like Trino and AWS Athena. Familiarity with core architecture principles of at‑scale systems. Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, including native tools like AWS Glue, S3, and Athena. Strong familiarity with Agile software development processes: Scrum or Kanban. Creativity and proactivity in solving complex scaling and operational problems, with a balance between new tech and optimizing existing solutions. Commitment to long‑term maintainability of the codebase and advocacy for refactoring and code cleanliness. Additional Skills and Knowledge 5+ years of experience working in software engineering teams. Comfortable working with remote team members. Ability to think pragmatically and balance business outcomes with technical goals. Ability to establish strong working relationships with peers across platform development teams. The base salary that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is $138,400 - $173,000. The actual base salary will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s skills, education, experience, etc. Please note that base pay is one important aspect of a compelling Total Rewards package and does not include any additional benefits or bonuses that may be available. Regular full‑time employees are eligible for benefits—please see the employee benefits section for details. #LI-SS2 Statement of Equal Opportunity At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio. #J-18808-Ljbffr