Manager, Platform Engineering

Description

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:

You will lead the engineering teams responsible for keeping our multi-cloud ecosystem reliable, observable, secure, and compliant. This scope spans two interconnected mandates: Reliability & Observability, which establishes company-wide observability standards and tooling (logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, SLOs, and incident response), and Cloud Governance, which automates policy-as-code, architectural guardrails, FinOps, and continuous compliance.

In this role, you will lead the strategic vision, design, and rollout of standardized observability frameworks across dozens of distributed engineering teams. You will balance operational rigor with developer velocity by treating the telemetry platform as a frictionless product—making the "paved path" the easiest and most effective way for product teams to instrument, monitor, and debug production systems.

Top Reasons to Apply:

1. Build & Shape a Growing Team: Join a newly established SRE Platform team and play a key role in defining its strategy, processes, and engineering best practices.
2. Lead High-Impact Initiatives: Drive Realtor.com's companywide observability transformation, including migration from Splunk to New Relic, automation, and reliability improvements.
3. Make an Organization-Wide Impact: Partner with engineering teams across Realtor.com to establish scalable platforms, improve system reliability, and influence the future of platform engineering.

What You'll Do:

People and Team Leadership

• Hire, coach, and develop SREs and cloud governance engineers, and grow tech leads within each team.
• Set clear goals, give regular feedback, and build a culture of blameless learning and ownership.
• Manage on-call health, including sustainable rotations and workload.

Observability Strategy & Enterprise Standardization

• Standardize Telemetry Architecture: Define and execute the roadmap for vendor-neutral telemetry collection across all microservices and infrastructure using standards such as OpenTelemetry (OTel).
• Roll Out "Paved Road" Instrumentation: Build, maintain, and drive the enterprise adoption of golden-path SDKs, auto-instrumentation libraries, shared dashboards, and structured logging schemas across heterogeneous runtimes.
• Unified Telemetry Pipeline: Architect ingestion pipelines that process high-volume metrics, logs, and distributed traces efficiently, balancing actionable insight with pipeline cost controls (sampling, indexing policies, and aggregation).
• SLO & Alerting Frameworks: Standardize Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets company-wide, integrating them directly into deployment gating and reliability reviews.
• Observability Governance & Cost Control: Partner with FinOps to audit telemetry spend, enforce ingestion budgets per domain/team, and eliminate duplicate or low-value data retention.

Reliability & Incident Lifecycle

• Oversee global incident response protocols, disaster recovery testing, and operational readiness reviews (ORRs) for tier-0/tier-1 services.
• Drive blameless post-incident reviews, tracking recurring failure modes and standardizing systemic remediations across teams.
• Lead runtime capacity planning, chaos engineering drills, and proactive stress testing to drive down MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) and MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve).

Cloud Governance

• Own the strategy for policy-as-code, account , tagging, and ownership standards.
• Translate the parent company’s security and audit requirements into automated guardrails and paved-road defaults.
• Integrate the parent’s security tooling into our pipelines and runtime with minimal friction for developers.
• Drive automated compliance evidence collection and timely remediation of findings.
  Run a lightweight exceptions and risk process.

Cross-Functional Alignment & Influence

• Act as the primary technical interface to parent-company infosec, enterprise architecture, and internal audit leadership.
• Partner closely with Architects and Engineering Managers to align telemetry schemas with service boundaries and feature delivery.
• Regularly communicate platform health, standardization progress, adoption milestones, and key reliability metrics to the leadership and executive stakeholders.

What You'll Bring:

• 8+ years of progressive software engineering, distributed systems, platform infrastructure, or SRE experience.
• 4+ years of direct engineering management experience leading SRE, Telemetry, DevOps, or Core Platform teams at scale.
• Proven track record leading enterprise-wide observability transformations, including standardizing distributed tracing, unified log forwarding, structured metrics, and alerting workflows across diverse product teams.
• Deep hands-on experience with modern observability ecosystems, particularly OpenTelemetry (Collector, SDKs, Auto-instrumentation), alongside enterprise platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, Honeycomb, Coralogix, or OpenSearch).
• Deep technical mastery of major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and production Kubernetes workload observability.
• Strong implementation experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and policy-as-code (OPA, Gatekeeper, Kyverno).
• Practical experience designing and operationalizing SLO/SLI frameworks, error budget policies, and blameless post-mortem standards.
• Strong stakeholder management and organizational change management skills—proven ability to drive platform adoption without direct line authority.

Nice to Have:

Preferred

• Hands-on experience migrating legacy, vendor-locked APM/monitoring stacks to standardized OpenTelemetry architectures.
• Experience managing observability and telemetry vendor costs at high ingestion volumes (petabyte-scale log aggregation, trace sampling strategies, high-cardinality metrics optimization).
• Experience operating inside a matrixed parent-subsidiary governance model or complex shared-services organization.
• Working knowledge of compliance and regulatory frameworks (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS) and automated control auditing.

How We Work:

We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work four or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person, adding richness to our culture and knitting us closer together.
 
How We Reward You:

Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:

• Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage
• Family forming benefits
• 13 Paid Holidays
• Flexible Time Off
• 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off
• Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location

Do the best work of your life at Realtor.com

Here, you’ll partner with a diverse team of experts as you use leading-edge tech to empower everyone to meet a crucial goal: finding their way home. And you’ll find your way home too. At Realtor.com®, you’ll bring your full self to work as you innovate with speed, serve our consumers, and champion your teammates. In return, we’ll provide you with a warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture; intellectual challenges; and the development opportunities you need to grow.

Diversity is important to us, therefore, Realtor.com® is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, Realtor.com® will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.