Staff Data Engineer - US (Remote)

What You’ll Do

Technical leadership & architecture

• Own the end-to-end architecture for MLS and property data: streaming and batch pipelines, microservices, storage layers, and APIs
• Design and evolve event-driven, Kafka-based data flows that power listing ingestion, enrichment, recommendations, and AI use cases
• Drive technical design reviews, set engineering best practices, and make high-quality tradeoffs around reliability, performance, and cost

Backend, data & platform engineering

• Design, build, and operate backend services (Python or Java) that expose listing, property, and recommendation data via robust APIs and microservices
• Implement scalable data processing with Spark or Flink on EMR (or similar), orchestrated via Airflow and running on Kubernetes where applicable
• Champion observability (metrics, tracing, logging) and operational excellence (alerting, runbooks, SLOs, on-call participation) for data and backend services

Streaming & batch data pipelines

• Build and maintain high-volume, schema-evolving streaming and batch pipelines that ingest and normalize MLS and third-party data
• Ensure data quality, lineage, and governance are built into the platform from the start—supporting analytics, AI/ML, and customer-facing features
• Partner with analytics engineering and data science to make data discoverable and usable (e.g., semantic layers, documentation, self-service tooling)

AI agents & data products

• Collaborate with ML/AI engineers to design and scale AI agents that automate MLS feed onboarding, listing discrepancy triage, and other operational workflows
• Work with frameworks such as PydanticAI, LangChain, or similar to integrate LLM-based agents into our data and service architecture
• Help define and implement evaluation, logging, and feedback loops so these agents and data-driven products continuously improve

Cross-functional impact & mentorship

• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and Operations to shape the roadmap for our data platform, MLS capabilities, and AI-powered experiences
• Translate ambiguous business and customer problems into clear technical strategies and phased delivery plans
• Mentor and unblock other engineers; elevate the overall level of technical decision-making on the team via pairing, reviews, and design guidance

What You’ll Bring

Experience & scope

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including owning production systems end-to-end
• Significant experience working with data-intensive or distributed systems at scale (high volume, high availability)
• Prior experience in a senior or staff/lead role where you influenced architecture, standards, and technical direction

Core technical skills

• Strong programming skills in Python or Java, with experience building microservices and APIs (REST/GraphQL)
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka or similar event/messaging platforms (Kinesis, Pub/Sub, etc.)
• Deep experience with:
  • Spark or Flink for large-scale data processing, across streaming and batch pipelines (on EMR or similar big-data compute)
  • Airflow (or equivalent orchestration tools)
  • Kubernetes for running data/compute workloads
• Strong SQL and data modeling skills; solid understanding of ETL/ELT patterns, data warehousing concepts, and performance tuning
• Experience building on AWS (preferred) or another major cloud provider, with a good grasp of cost, reliability, and security tradeoffs

AI agent experience

• Experience building or integrating AI agents into production workflows (e.g., internal tools, support automation, operational triage, or data workflows)
• Familiarity with frameworks such as PydanticAI, LangGraph, Claude Code or similar, and how they interact with backend services, vector stores, and LLM APIs
• Comfort working with logs, telemetry, and evaluation metrics to monitor, debug, and iteratively improve AI-driven systems

Leadership & collaboration

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across teams, from idea to production (alignment, design, implementation, rollout)
• Track record of mentoring other engineers and raising the bar on code quality, testing, and design
• Strong communication skills; able to clearly explain complex technical decisions to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Customer and product mindset: you care about how the data and services you build improve the end-user and client experience, not just the internals

Nice to Have

• Experience with any of:
  • Iceberg, Hive, or other table formats/data lake technologies
  • Snowflake, Athena, Redshift, or other cloud data warehouses
  • dbt or similar transformation frameworks
  • Data quality / observability tools (e.g., Great Expectations, Monte Carlo, Datafold)
  • Vector databases / retrieval (e.g., LanceDB, Pinecone, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch)
• Background in real estate, marketplaces, or other domains where data quality and freshness are highly visible to customers
• Prior experience in a startup or high-growth environment where you’ve built or significantly evolved a data platform