Senior Principal Engineer

About this role

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.

About the Role

Realtor.com is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to provide company-wide technical leadership across our consumer applications, search platforms, data and machine learning systems, APIs, and AI-enabled products.

This is one of the most senior individual-contributor roles at Realtor.com. You will help define the technical direction for a high-scale digital marketplace used by millions of consumers. You will work across organizational boundaries to solve the company’s most complex engineering problems, shape long-term architecture, and ensure that major technology investments improve customer experience, business growth, reliability, security, and engineering velocity.

This role requires both breadth and depth. You must be able to move from executive-level technology strategy to hands-on architectural leadership across web, mobile, search, machine learning, distributed systems, and cloud platforms. Success will come through influence, technical judgment, execution, and the ability to make engineering teams across Realtor.com more effective.

What You’ll Do

Shape Company-Wide Technical Direction

• Help define Realtor.com’s target architecture and multi-year technology strategy across web, mobile, search, APIs, identity, data, machine learning, AI, and developer platforms.

• Translate business and product priorities into scalable, secure, and practical technical roadmaps.

• Identify architectural risks, platform gaps, modernization opportunities, and areas of unnecessary complexity.

• Establish lightweight standards and reference architectures that improve consistency without slowing teams down.

• Advise senior engineering and product leaders on major technology investments and build-versus-buy decisions.

Lead Critical Cross-Company Initiatives

• Provide technical leadership for high-impact programs spanning multiple products, platforms, and engineering organizations.

• Define end-to-end architectures, key interfaces, decision points, and implementation paths.

• Remain engaged from technical discovery through delivery, rollout, and operational adoption.

• Step into critical incidents, performance issues, security concerns, or architectural escalations where senior technical judgment is required.

• Drive alignment when requirements are ambiguous or ownership is distributed across teams.

Lead Search, Data, and Machine Learning Architecture

• Provide architectural leadership for large-scale search, ranking, recommendations, personalization, and location-based experiences.

• Guide the design of data pipelines, feature platforms, model-serving systems, experimentation frameworks, and real-time decisioning capabilities.

• Partner with product, data science, machine learning, and engineering teams to move models reliably from experimentation into production.

• Establish patterns for model evaluation, observability, explainability, cost management, privacy, and responsible AI.

• Help evolve search and ML platforms that improve relevance, engagement, conversion, and customer trust.

Strengthen Platform, Reliability, and Security

• Guide architecture across APIs, distributed services, event-driven systems, identity, cloud infrastructure, and shared platforms.

• Improve service boundaries, data ownership, observability, resilience, scalability, and failure isolation.

• Partner with security teams to embed security, privacy, and compliance into system design.

• Strengthen service-level objectives, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and incident readiness.

• Turn recurring operational issues into durable architectural improvements rather than repeated tactical fixes.

Develop Realtor.com’s Technical Community

• Mentor Principal Engineers, Staff Engineers, architects, engineering managers, and emerging technical leaders.

• Raise the quality of design reviews, technical proposals, architecture decisions, incident analysis, and engineering documentation.

• Build alignment across teams through technical forums, reference implementations, and shared engineering practices.

• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to executives, product leaders, and engineering teams.

• Influence through evidence, clarity, trust, and strong technical credibility rather than positional authority.

What You’ll Bring

• Extensive software engineering experience (15+ years), including leadership as a Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect, or equivalent senior technical role.

• A proven record of shaping architecture across large, complex, high-scale engineering organizations.

• Deep experience with distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, APIs, data systems, observability, security, and reliability engineering.

• Strong knowledge of search systems, ranking, recommendations, personalization, and high-volume data platforms.

• Experience building and operating machine learning or generative AI systems in production.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple organizations without direct authority.

• Strong judgment in balancing speed, customer value, operational risk, cost, and long-term architectural health.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.

• A history of me

Similar jobs

• Senior Principal Engineer Software — Palo Alto Networks · Office - USA - CA - Headquarters
• Senior Principal System Engineer — Cubic · San Diego, California
• Senior Principal Systems Engineer — Cubic · San Diego, California
• Sr. Principal Engineer — Fresenius Kabi · Wilson, NC
• Senior Principal Software Engineer — Rocket · Remote
• Senior Principal Engineer, Systems Design/Architect — Analog Devices · Wilmington, MA
• Senior Principal Engineer, Systems Design/Architecture Engineering — Analog Devices · Wilmington, MA | Limerick, Ireland | Somerset, NJ
• Senior Principal Software Applications Engineer — Marvell · Santa Clara, CA