Staff Software Engineer - Investor/Owner

AppFolio is a technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry, seeking a pioneering technical leader to join their product development team. The Staff Software Engineer will drive the technical vision and strategy, lead the design of complex systems, and collaborate across teams to build innovative SaaS products for property managers and owners.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the technical vision and strategy across the Owner subsegment, influencing the product roadmap and making key architectural decisions that align with business goals
• Lead the design and implementation of complex, distributed systems that power our next-generation products, preparing our systems for a 10x increase in traffic and engagement
• Act as a force multiplier by coaching engineers and fostering a high-trust, autonomous culture where continuous learning and ownership are the norms
• Collaborate as a peer with Product, Design, and Machine Learning leaders to bridge the gap between "what’s possible" in AI and "what’s valuable" for our customers
• Operate in a highly autonomous team that owns the full lifecycle of solutions you build, from discovery to development to production
• Proactively research, share, and apply new technologies and patterns that improve system quality and accelerate delivery
• Use test-driven development, code reviews, and continuous integration to deliver high-quality software and rapidly fix bugs as they come up

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience developing and scaling web-based applications, preferably in a SaaS environment
• A track record of leading high-stakes projects from initial ambiguity to successful launch–aligning stakeholders, making tough technical trade-offs, and ensuring long-term system health
• Experience leading architectural discussions, defining system design, and guiding technical decision-making
• Proactively adopted AI tooling into your daily workflow. You don't just use these tools; you understand how to prompt, iterate, and validate AI-generated output to maintain the highest standards of excellence
• A pragmatic approach to technology, adopting new tools where they add value, while mastering proven technologies
• Caring about long-term maintainability, advocating for clean architecture, and driving continuous refactoring and improvement
• Balancing intensity and sustainability—you'll go the extra mile when needed but also model healthy work-life balance
• Ability to solve complex problems without a roadmap
• Loving to learn about and use new tech, but understanding the value of continuing to leverage existing technology when it gets the job done
• Caring about the long-term maintainability of the codebase and advocating for refactoring and code cleanliness
• Identifying and resolving code-smells through sensible refactoring
• Caring about work-life balance and wanting your company to care about it, too; you'll put in the extra hour when needed but won't let it become a habit
• Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline
• Experience with technologies in our stack such as Ruby on Rails, Golang, React, AWS, or service-oriented architectures