Senior Software Engineer - Applied AI

Socket.dev; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 136,000 - 184,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first work environment

401(k) with employer match

Meaningful equity grant

Comprehensive medical, dental, vision,

Job summary

Homeward, a fast-paced remote-first real estate startup, seeks an Applied AI Engineer in Austin, TX. You will build AI-powered features, including LLM API integrations and RAG pipelines, and create reusable tooling for teams to deploy AI in production.

This role reports to the SVP, Technology and emphasizes ownership, rapid problem solving, and clear stakeholder communication. The ideal candidate has 4–6 years in back-end development, hands-on AI/ML production experience, and strong Python with

Qualifications

• 4–6 years of professional back-end development experience in a fast-moving environment.
• Hands-on experience building or operating AI/ML systems in production, focusing on reliability, performance, cost and safety.
• Production experience with LLM APIs, including prompt design and context management.
• Strong Python proficiency and experience with Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
• Solid grounding in REST APIs, asynchronous tasks, and data management.

Responsibilities

• Have an immediate impact on how Homeward builds with AI.
• Design, build, and maintain AI-powered features including LLM API integrations and RAG pipelines.
• Build and improve shared tooling for teams to access and operate LLMs in production.
• Contribute to observability, monitoring, evaluation, and prompt/context management.
• Prototype solutions and harden them for shipping and maintenance.
• Shape patterns and practices for building with AI at Homeward and enable team adoption.
• Evaluate new models and tools, and help others adopt them.
• Use AI coding assistants as part of daily workflow and improve team usage.
• Write automated tests to support CI pipelines and participate in code reviews.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Data to ensure useful, well-documented output.

Skills

Back-end development

AI/ML systems

LLM APIs

Python

Web development

Tools

Django/Flask/FastAPI

REST APIs

CI/CD

Git

Job description

About Homeward

Homeward takes the "what ifs" out of homebuying by creating financial products that give buyers and sellers certainty and convenience.We're a fast-paced, remote-first real estate startup that partners with real estate agents to offer innovative products and services, helping clients buy with cash, sell with certainty, and time their move, regardless of the market.

Founder and CEO Tim Heyl, owner of one of the fastest-growing agent teams in the country, started Homeward in 2018 to fix the antiquated and broken real estate process. Today, we offer bundled cash offers, mortgage, and title services in 13 states, enabling buyers and sellers to move with certainty and convenience.

We're a fully remote company with a diverse team spread across several countries - Grounded in three core values: The Golden Rule, One Team One Dream, and Calm Focus. Hear from our employees about what our values mean to them.

About The Opportunity

Homeward is looking for an Applied AI Engineer to help us build AI into our products and the way our team works. This role has two sides: building the tooling and practices that make it easier for every team here to build with AI, and taking on hard, AI-solved problems. Our Product & Technology team works closely with internal partners as well as our external customers, agents, and their teams and brokerages, so the AI products you build will reach both. The ideal candidate is a self-starter who takes pride in ownership of their work, can diagnose issues and develop solutions quickly, and communicates clearly with multiple stakeholders. This role reports to the SVP, Technology.

Please note, this role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

Due to current team needs we are only accepting candidates based in Austin, TX.

Responsibilities:

• Have an immediate impact on how Homeward builds with AI
• Design, build, and maintain AI-powered features in our products, including LLM API integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and AI-driven automation across our customer, agent, and operations tools
• Understand and communicate requirements and
• Build and improve shared tooling and reusable components that make it easier for teams across tech to access, integrate, and operate LLMs in production
• Contribute to the tooling we use to keep AI features reliable - observability, monitoring, evaluation, and prompt and context management - so we can measure and debug them with confidence
• Take on hard, ambiguous problems that can be solved leveraging LLMs and ML to solve real business problems, then help others learn how to solve similar problems
• Prototype solutions quickly, then work with peers and senior engineers to harden them into something we can ship and maintain
• Help shape the patterns and practices for building with AI at Homeward, and make the right way the easy way for the rest of the team
• Evaluate new models, tools, and approaches, recommend what's worth adopting, and help others adopt it
• Use AI coding assistants (Claude, Copilot) as a natural part of your daily workflow, and help the team get more out of them
• Write automated unit and integration tests to support our CI pipelines, and participate in code reviews
• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Data to make sure what we build is useful, well-documented, and easy to adopt

About You:

• 4-6 years of professional back-end development experience, ideally in a fast-moving environment
• Hands-on experience building or operating AI/ML systems in production, and a real interest in the practical side of it - reliability, performance, cost, and safety
• Production experience with LLM APIs, including prompt design and context management
• Strong experience with Python and a back-end framework such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI
• Solid grounding in web development best practices - REST APIs, asynchronous task management, and sound data management
• Good judgment on the trade-offs between reliability, latency, cost, quality, and maintainability, and the willingness to make the call
• Incredibly strong ownership of delivering the right solutions at a high quality
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to make complex things clear to others
• A build, test, learn mindset with a bias toward action and a focus on business outcomes
• Scrappy and flexible - from updating an email template to building a complex web app, you do what the team needs and you're eager to learn along the way
• General curiosity and comfort navigating a fast-changing AI landscape
• Working knowledge of version control and CI/CD tools

Pay & Benefits

Compensation:

• $160k base salary.
• Annual performance bonus eligibility.
• Meaningful equity grant - stock options with real upside potential.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance coverage - with company contributions towards premiums.
• Meaningful time off - including 20 days of paid vacation, 5 sick days, 12 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays.
• Generous paid parental leave of up to 13 weeks.
• 401(k) with employer contribution match.
• Remote-first work environment (our headquarters are in Austin, TX).
• Collaborative, low-ego team that values intellectual curiosity and continuous improvement.

See more about how Homeward takes care of our team here.

Value-Driven Employee Experience

THE GOLDEN RULE. It’s simple: Treat others the way we want to be treated. Whether we're dealing with colleagues or customers, we don't prioritize money or growth over people, and we practice empathy at every opportunity.

CALM FOCUS. We work in tech and build solutions for real estate. Both are fast-paced and stressful industries. But by focusing on the larger objective rather than rushing from one task to the next, we can create solutions our customers love.

ONE TEAM, ONE DREAM. Big problems require big solutions. We look at our customers’ experiences holistically and recognize that solving them requires collaboration across teams and our three affiliate companies - Homeward, Homeward Mortgage and Homeward Title.