Staff Engineer - Cloud Platform

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 Software Engineer – Cloud Platform to join our growing infrastructure organization. This is a high-impact opportunity to help build and shape the Cloud Platform team and the foundational capabilities that support engineers across the company.

You will be a senior technical contributor responsible for defining cloud standards, scaling platform capabilities, and improving the developer experience for teams building and operating products on AWS. You will take ownership of cloud governance, automated remediation, internal developer tooling, self-service infrastructure, and cost optimization, turning complex infrastructure requirements into practical capabilities that engineering teams can adopt.

This is a high-impact opportunity with broad visibility across Engineering, Security, and Finance. You will help establish the operating model for a growing Cloud Platform team while maintaining a hands-on role in architecture, automation, and platform delivery. We believe in leveraging the best tools to solve problems faster. You will be expected to use AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development, generate boilerplate, document systems, and troubleshoot complex problems. You will apply critical judgment to verify AI-generated output for security, performance, reliability, and accuracy.

What you’ll do

Cloud Platform Architecture & Standards

• Define and evolve reusable cloud platform patterns for AWS infrastructure, production Kubernetes, account governance, networking, identity, security, and operational readiness.
• Lead the design and implementation of infrastructure-as-code modules, templates, and reference architectures using Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, or comparable tools.
• Establish practical platform standards that balance developer autonomy with security, reliability, compliance, and cost requirements.
• Partner with engineering leaders and technical teams to assess platform needs, make architecture tradeoffs, and guide adoption of shared capabilities.

Cloud Governance & Automated Remediation

• Implement and maintain governance controls for security, tagging, resource lifecycle, account configuration, and compliance across AWS environments.
• Build policy-as-code and automated remediation capabilities using Cloud Custodian, AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies, or equivalent technologies.
• Create detection, reporting, and remediation workflows for configuration drift, cloud risk, orphaned resources, and cost issues.
• Work with Security, Finance, and Engineering to translate governance requirements into automated, developer-friendly controls.

Internal Developer Platform & Paved Paths

• Build and improve self-service platform capabilities that allow engineering teams to provision and operate infrastructure without unnecessary manual intervention.
• Run and extend internal developer portal capabilities such as Backstage, including service catalogs, plugins, onboarding workflows, and platform documentation.
• Integrate infrastructure-as-code, policy checks, security validation, and operational readiness into delivery workflows.
• Develop reusable tooling, automation, and diagnostics that reduce developer friction and improve platform adoption.

AWS, Kubernetes, FinOps & Reliability

• Define and maintain governance for AWS and production Kubernetes/EKS environments, including access, security, networking, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
• Support reliable containerized workloads using Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and related cloud-native technologies.
• Drive cost optimization through rightsizing, utilization analysis, reserved capacity, Savings Plans, spot usage, autoscaling, and workload lifecycle management.
• Build cost controls, dashboards, alerts, and reporting that help teams understand resource consumption and make cost-conscious architecture decisions.
• Improve observability and contribute to incident response, post-incident reviews, runbooks, and reliability improvements for shared platform capabilities.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams through architecture reviews, design guidance, documentation, and hands-on delivery.
• Mentor engineers in infrastructure automation, cloud governance, platform engineering, and operational best practices.
• Build alignment across Engineering, Security, Finance, and other business partners.
• Maintain an active coding footprint in Python, Go, Java, Bash, or similar languages used to build platform automation and internal tooling.

What you’ll bring

Experience & Expertise

• 8+ years of experience in cloud platform, DevOps, infrastructure, SRE, or software engineering roles with significant infrastructure ownership.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience designing, provisioning, and troubleshooting AWS infrastructure in production environments.
• 3+ years of experience managing production-grade Kubernetes or Amazon EKS environments.
• Demonstrated experience building reusable platform capabilities, cloud governance systems, internal tooling, or self-service infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience influencing technical standards and architecture across team boundaries without relying on formal management authority.

Technical Skills

• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS, EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, VPC, IAM, Lambda, Fargate, Route 53, AWS Organizations, and related cloud services.
• Kubernetes and containers: Kubernetes, EKS, Docker, Helm, cluster governance, workload security, networking, and lifecycle management.
• IaC and automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, Terragrunt, Ansible, Python, Go, Java, or Bash.
• CI/CD and GitOps: ArgoCD, CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable delivery platforms.
• Governance and security: Cloud Custodian, AWS Service Control Policies, policy-as-code, IAM, RBAC, secrets management, and vulnerability management.
• Developer platforms: Backstage, service catalogs, internal developer porta