The RealReal Staff Software Engineer

As a luxury consignment company, almost everything we sell is unique and in different conditions. Every day we receive tens of thousands of items in our authentication centers; This presents fun challenges in processing unique items.

Some of the optimization problems associated with having unique items with different conditions:

• Every item must be described, priced, and photographed to capture an item’s differing conditions.


• Experts need to authenticate each item accurately.


• Operations of shipping, storing, and managing the inventory of so many unique items.

Along with these exciting problems, we also have multiple authentication centers and stores, which present additional exciting problems:

• How can we best optimize the tools to empower our employees?


• How can we automate or remove redundant work, making our processes faster?


• How can we enable new types of supply that may have new rules and processes?

As a Staff Engineer, you will be the point person for team and project technical direction, a strong partner to the Engineering Manager, and an active hands-on contributor. The team will rely on you as a mentor and a shepherd of good engineering practices.

What You Get To Do Every Day

• Provide technical direction and mentorship for your team of fellow engineers


• Partner with engineering and product management to review stories and ensure optimal resource allocation


• Coordinate cross-team engineering efforts and determining technical requirements


• Review pull requests and provide constructive feedback


• Produce high quality, performant, testable code


• Contribute to the team’s consistent, measurable velocity


• Deploy to production frequently


• Help define technical strategy and architecture

What You Bring To The Role

• 10+ years of professional web application/full-stack development experience


• 2+ years leading a high-performance engineering team, in a fast-paced environment


• Fluency with any of Ruby, Elixir, Erlang, or another object-oriented or functional programming language


• Strong understanding of web technologies: HTML5, Javascript, CSS/SASS, REST, JSON


• Strong understanding of web-app performance fundamentals and related dev tools


• Strong database fundamentals and experience with MySql or PostgreSQL


• Experience using async message queues such as Kafka


• Mastery of git and Github workflows


• Experience with Microservices architecture


• Bachelor of Computer Science degree or equivalent experience

Nice to Haves:

• Experience building E-commerce, Operations, and Logistics applications


• Experience with Headless E-commerce APIs


• Experience working with machine learning or related technologies


• Experience with GraphQL