Staff Software Engineer - Communications

Hi, We’re AppFolio

We’re innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We’re more than just a software company – we’re pioneers in cloud and AI who deliver magical experiences that make our customers’ lives easier. We’re revolutionizing how people do business in the real estate industry, and we want your ideas, enthusiasm, and passion to help us keep innovating.

We are in search of a Staff Software Engineer to lead our communications space at AppFolio. You are a tech enthusiast, tinkerer, and leader with a track record for shipping exemplary software at scale and inspiring others to achieve the same. You approach software development with a cross-functional, growth-oriented mindset, demonstrating an interest in and respect for all roles within our organization. Additionally, you are a strong mentor and a servant leader of engineering teams, setting a strong example for others to follow. In joining us, you will combine this skillset with knowledge of large scale event driven architectures - making you critical for us to realize our vision to make owning, renting or working on a property seamless and easy.

AppFolio systems currently send over 1 billion SMS and email messages per year and we’re continuing to scale up. Our communications space also features many of our remarkable features such as allowing property managers to send LLM curated suggested responses and take suggested actions based on tenant messages saving property managers time on key workflows. Our team’s upcoming work will support a large number of exciting features delivered to our tenants, property managers, owners and vendors that use AppFolio on a regular basis and we can’t wait to have you as part of this journey!

Responsibilities:

Drive the technical vision and strategy for the communications platform, influencing the product roadmap and making key architectural decisions

Collaborate with an experienced and highly effective team of passionate engineers and product managers

Redefine solutions that scale with the increasing growth of our customers

Operate in a highly autonomous team that owns the full lifecycle of solutions you build, from discovery to development to production

Talk directly with customers to understand their challenges and get direct feedback on the features you're building

Lead by example and publicly share your knowledge to foster a culture of excellence and continuous improvement

Pave the way for engineering teams by promoting and implementing best practices, optimizing the developer experience, and establishing a platform dedicated to the continuous delivery of high-quality software

You know you're the right fit if…

You have experience building communications frameworks for software companies or experience creating large scale, event driven ecosystems

You display strong capacity and drive to mentor and coach other engineers and continuously uplevel team members as engineers

You are proficient in communication and collaboration, with a resulting reputation for positive influence and accessibility

You have strong sense of ownership of the tech and the team

You have excellent collaboration skills to contribute cross-functionally and in a team setting

You have the ability to thrive with high levels of personal initiative, autonomy, and responsibility

Must haves:

8+ years of experience working in agile software engineering teams

Extensive experience in developing SaaS web applications and traversing the whole entire delivery process and stack

Proven capability to produce high-quality, maintainable code that serves as a solid foundation for future development

Proven experience with object-oriented languages (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C#, etc.)

Experience with modern cloud software services (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and methodologies, such as event-driven systems and DevOps

Experience with modern (CircleCI, Cypress, Playwright) CI/CD and automation frameworks

Strong familiarity with RESTful API design and web-based APIs

Experience designing and managing scalable data storage solutions, including relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g., DynamoDB, OpenSearch)

Experience working on platform teams or building platform services, whose customers are other internal teams

Nice to have:

Experience with SMS, email, voice and chat protocols, as well as communications vendors (such as Twilio and Sendgrid)

Experience with AI/ML technologies

Compensation & Benefits

The base salary that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is $167,200 - $209,000.

The actual title and base salary for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s skills, education, experience, etc. Please note that base pay is one important aspect of a compelling Total Rewards package. The base pay range indicated here does not include any additional benefits or bonuses/commissions that you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.

Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits - see here.

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