Data Engineer, San Francisco, CA

Who We Are

We’re building the future of real estate — today.

HomeLight is the real estate technology platform powering innovative transactions for top agents, lenders, and their clients. Our technology makes it easier to buy and sell homes, whether that's enabling clients to buy before they sell, find a top agent, or have certainty through a modern closing process. Each year, HomeLight facilitates billions of dollars of residential real estate business on its platform for thousands of agents and loan officers. Our vision is a world where every real estate transaction is simple, certain, and satisfying for all.

Our team breaks barriers every day while staying committed to HomeLight's goals and core values, which is a crucial element to our shared success.

We’re expanding our engineering team within HomeLight’s Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) business and are looking for a product-minded, AI-native engineer to help build and scale the systems that power both our customer-facing products and internal operations.

In this role, you’ll work across the stack at the intersection of product engineering, data, and AI to create intuitive, high-impact user experiences. You won’t just ship features, you’ll build intelligent, scalable systems where AI is deeply embedded in how we design and operate, not treated as an add-on. You’ll contribute to platforms that support hundreds of thousands of referrals each year while helping shape how data and AI drive meaningful product outcomes. We’re looking for someone who actively leverages AI to move faster, thinks in systems and thrives in ambiguity. If you enjoy solving complex problems and building with impact, this role is for you.

• Leverage AI tools (e.g., LLMs, prompt engineering, coding copilots) to accelerate development and uncover insights
• Apply an AI-first mindset to automate workflows, enhance decision-making, and improve internal and user-facing systems
• Partner with cross-functional teams to define, build, and iterate on key business and performance metrics
• Develop and evolve data models, schemas, and warehouse architecture to support growing data needs
• Build and maintain systems to ingest, process, and serve data reliably, including near real-time pipelines where needed
• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and ETL workflows to support analytics and operational use cases
• Improve and scale existing data infrastructure and pipelines for performance, reliability, and maintainability

What You Bring

• 2+ years of experience in data, software or backend engineering roles
• Experience applying LLMs and prompt engineering to real-world workflows
• Strong proficiency in Python for building services, data pipelines and backend systems
• Experience designing, building, and operating service-oriented architectures and APIs
• Solid understanding of data modeling, system design, and scalable architecture patterns
• Hands-on experience with data pipelines and ETL workflows (Airflow or similar)
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot)
• Strong analytical thinking with a bias toward automation and building scalable systems

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience building and scaling product features using frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django
• Familiarity with AWS to support production applications
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch or other search technologies for user-facing features
• Exposure to LLM-powered product use cases (ChatGPT, conversational interfaces, automation)
• Experience working in a startup or fast-paced environment with high ownership

The Perks

• Medical (Aetna or Kaiser), Dental & Vision (Guardian)
• Long-Term Disability & Short-Term Disability
• Hospital Indemnity Insurance, Accident Plan, and Employee Critical Illness (Guardian)
• 401k (Vestwell), Life Insurance (Guardian) & Pet Insurance (Nationwide)
• Commuter benefits are offered in certain locations
• PTO, including Volunteer Days to give back to your community
• Annual Anniversary Perks, including one month paid sabbaticals!
• HomeLight Services to help you with buying and selling your home

The following compensation information is provided to comply with job posting disclosure requirements in Colorado, New York, Washington, and California.
Base Pay Range: $140,000.00 - $160,000.00, base pay will vary depending on several factors, such as the position, location, qualifications of the individual, market conditions, and other operational business requirements.Range is dependent on the leveling process during the interview process.

Let’s chat! 

HomeLight is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building an inclusive and diverse workforce, providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV Status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. We will provide accommodations during the recruitment process upon request, and any accommodation will be addressed confidentially.