Data Engineer, San Francisco, CA
About the role
About HomeLight
We are on a mission to empower people to make smarter decisions during one of life’s most important moments: buying or selling their home. By analyzing 40 million+ real estate transactions from 2.5 million agents across the country, we are able to take an unbiased, data-driven approach to match our clients with top-performing real estate agents to meet each of their specific needs. Our algorithm and marketplace solutions guide our clients through every step of the home buying or selling experience. Join us and build our first Data Engineering team and the # destination for home sellers! Learn more about our engineering team!
What You'll Do Here:
We are building our Data Engineering team to tackle HomeLight's diverse data challenges. This position is an excellent opportunity for an engineer who wants to own the development, optimization, and operation of our data pipeline, which collects, processes, and distributes data to a suite of HomeLight products and teams. You will provide mission-critical data to both our algorithms and internal users, refining our product and identifying new markets. Some projects you will work on:
- Optimize and execute on requests to pull, analyze, interpret, and visualize data
- Partner with team leaders across the organization to build out and iterate on team and individual performance metrics
- Optimize our data release processes, and partner with team leads to iterate on and improve existing data pipelines.
- Design and develop systems that ingest and transform our data streams using the latest tools.
- Design, build, and integrate new cutting-edge databases and data warehouses, develop new data schemas and figure out new innovative ways of storing and representing our data.
- Research, architect, build, and test robust, highly available, and massively scalable systems, software, and services.
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, Codex, Claude Code)
- Strong analytical thinking with a bias toward automation and building scalable systems
Nice to Have
- 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 (Anthem or Kaiser), Dental & Vision (Guardian)
- Long-Term Disability & Short-Term Disability, Hospital Indemnity Insurance (Aflac)
- 401k (Accrue), Life Insurance (Guardian) & Pet Insurance (Nationwide)
- Commuter Benefits for in-office employees
- PTO, including Volunteer Days, to give back to your community
- Annual Anniversary Perks, including professional development and sabbaticals
- HomeLight Services to help you with buying and selling your home
Description as published by HomeLight.