Software Test Eng, Sr

As a Senior SDET for Lead Services and Concierge at http://Realtor.com (RDC), you are a key technical contributor for the quality of the distributed services that power lead ingestion, vetting, allocation, monetization, and delivery—including the concierge experiences that connect consumers and agents via phone, SMS, and digital channels. You help design and evolve the test architecture for these revenue‑critical flows, turn quality risks into concrete test plans, and make it easier for developers to ship reliable services at scale. You work hands-on in code, influence service and workflow design, and mentor engineers in modern testing practices for APIs, events, data pipelines, and contact‑center integrations.

We believe in leveraging the best tools to solve problems faster. You will be expected to utilize AI coding assistants and LLMs proficiently to accelerate development velocity, generate boilerplate, and troubleshoot complex debugging scenarios. Beyond simple usage, this role requires the critical judgment to verify AI-generated outputs for security, performance, and accuracy. You should be comfortable integrating AI tooling into your daily workflow to eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on high-impact architectural and strategic engineering challenges.

What You’ll Do

Strategic Planning (Services, Concierge & Lead Flows)

• Contribute to planning quality initiatives for lead-lifecycle services (ingestion, enrichment, vetting, allocation/monetization, delivery) and concierge journeys, with a focus on correctness, resilience, and SLAs such as time‑to‑first‑contact and connection quality.
• Help define and maintain a layered test strategy (unit, integration/service, contract, end-to-end, performance) for your squad within Lead Services and Concierge, grounded in business risk and deployment expectations.
• Surface and refine systemic quality risks in lead and concierge flows (e.g., routing accuracy, duplicate handling, idempotency, data consistency, retries) and translate them into actionable test cases and automation work.

Technical Leadership (APIs, Events, Telephony & Data)

• Drive hands-on testing for backend services, REST/GraphQL APIs, and event-driven workflows (e.g., Kafka, queues, batch jobs), plus integrations with telephony/contact-center and CRM systems that power concierge experiences.
• Advocate for testability in designs: schemas, contracts, observability (logs/metrics/traces, call outcomes, funnel metrics), and deployment patterns so failures are detectable and diagnosable.
• Partner with engineers to ensure changes to contracts, schemas, routing logic, and concierge workflows are validated at the service and contract levels, not just through UI tests.

Test Automation (Service, Contract, and Data Validation)

• Design, build, and maintain robust, reusable automation for API, service, contract, and data testing in Python, Java (and/or TypeScript/Node), using frameworks such as pytest, TestNG/JUnit, REST Assured, and Pact (or similar).
• Implement utilities that validate lifecycle objects, payload schemas, routing decisions, monetization rules, and concierge contact/attempt logic across services and data stores.
• Apply performance and load-testing tools (e.g., JMeter, Gatling, k6) to your squad’s critical paths (e.g., high‑throughput allocation, concierge dialing/queueing, delivery fan‑out) and integrate them into CI/CD and monitoring, with guidance from Staff/Principal engineers.

Stakeholder Collaboration (Cross‑Functional Delivery)

• Work closely with development, product, data, and concierge operations/call-center partners to embed practical quality checks and signals into everyday delivery.
• Pair with developers to write and maintain functional, integration, and contract tests as part of service and workflow codebases.
• Collaborate with platform and release teams to keep automated checks healthy in CI/CD (e.g., CircleCI, GitHub Actions), and help tune quality gates for APIs, contracts, and your team’s critical workflows.

Training and Mentorship

• Mentor SDETs and software engineers on service‑level test design, contract testing, debugging distributed systems, and observability‑driven validation, primarily within your team or adjacent teams.
• Share paved‑path patterns, utilities, and examples that help engineers add the right kinds of tests and keep them maintainable.

Planning, Communication, and Incident Learning

• Help balance changing priorities with your product and engineering partners, clearly articulating quality and risk trade-offs for your area.
• Participate in incident reviews for lead and concierge flows, helping identify test gaps, environment issues, and data problems, and turning findings into test improvements.
• Communicate test coverage, gaps, and risks in clear, concise language tailored to engineers, product managers, and operations partners.

Technology Evaluation and Modernization

• Pilot and provide feedback on AI‑assisted and ML‑driven testing capabilities (e.g., test authoring support, log/trace and call‑log triage, flakiness detection) for your team’s workflows.
• Contribute to evaluating and adopting tooling for contract testing, data validation, telephony simulation, and environment management that fits RDC’s paved paths and standards.

Agile & Delivery Practices

• Participate fully in your squad’s Agile/Scrum processes, ensuring service and concierge quality signals are included in refinement, planning, and the definition of done.
• Help your team ship faster and safer by shifting validation earlier, automating critical checks, and making quality metrics part of day‑to‑day decision making.

What You''ll Bring

• 5+ years of experience in software and/or test engineering, with substantial hands-on work in backend services, APIs, and/or event‑driven systems.
• 2+ years owning or leading test design and automation for a service, product area, or team-level domain.
• Proven experience designing and implementing test strategies for services in distributed or microservices architectures (REST/GraphQL APIs, streams/queues, batch jobs, or data pipelines).
• Strong debugging skills for complex integrated environments, using logs, metrics, and traces (e.g., Splunk, New Relic, CloudWatch, or similar) to isolate and explain issues.
• Proficiency in at least one major language in our ecosystem (e.g., Python, Java, TypeScript/JavaScript/Node) and experience building reusable test utilities, fixtures, and helpers for service and data validation.
• Hands-on experience with API and service‑level testing frameworks (e.g., pytest + requests, REST Assured, Postman/Newman, TestNG/JUnit) and familiarity with contract testing concepts/tools (e.g., Pact, schema validation for REST/GraphQL or events).
• Experience designing or running performance and load tests for services using tools such as JMeter, Gatling, or k6, or a strong interest and foundational knowledge to ramp quickly.
• Practical experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins), including test suites configuration, basic parallelization, and triage of failing checks.
• Familiarity with cloud-native and containerized environments (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes) and how they impact test data, environments, and dependencies.
• Understanding of data quality and schema evolution across service boundaries; experience validating domain models and schemas for transactional or lifecycle flows (e.g., leads, orders, subscriptions) is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to reduce flakiness and improve test signal quality for your team, turning manual checks into reliable automation.
• Experience with or interest in concierge, contact‑center, or inside‑sales systems (dialers, telephony platforms, CRM integrations, call/SMS workflows) is a plus.
• Experience with agentic AI tooling or AI/ML‑driven testing solutions (test generation, triage assistance, anomaly detection) is a plus.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

How we Reward you:

Realtor.com® is committed to investing in the health and well-being 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 degree and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location