Staff Software Engineer

News Corp is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical reliability and direction behind Realtor.com’s Organic Growth Engineering platform. This individual-contributor role combines technical SEO with organic social sharing and deeplinking systems, with ownership of incident response, SLOs/SLIs, and production-grade execution at scale.

Role Overview

The Staff Software Engineer (Technical SEO & Social Lead) owns the platform’s technical strategy and operational reliability for organic search and organic social sharing/deeplinking. Responsibilities span crawl, indexation, canonicalization, robots, sitemaps, and rendering strategy, along with share-link resolution via AppsFlyer and the systems required for dependable attribution and routing.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the technical strategy for SEO at scale, including crawl budget, indexation, canonicalization, robots directives, sitemaps, and rendering across millions of pages, plus establish QA testing methodology and regression-testing standards before production changes.
• Set the technical strategy for organic social sharing and deeplinking, including standards for share-link reliability and the way shared listing links resolve through AppsFlyer link generation, attribution, and in-app vs. web fallback.
• Lead incident response for SEO and deeplinking by diagnosing issues across edge and delivery, bot management, routing, rendering, content services, and attribution/MMP infrastructure, and driving the appropriate owners to resolve cross-system failures.
• Own the escalation framework, run war rooms, and ensure post-mortems close the loop into new alerts, gates, and runbooks.
• Own SEO and social-sharing reliability direction by defining SLOs/SLIs and the on-call model in collaboration with the observability engineer, covering crawl/indexation health and deeplink resolution/attribution health.
• Maintain a reviewed view of shipping changes that impact organic-critical pages or the share/deeplink path in partnership with the Organic Growth PMs, including the Director, Organic Growth.
• Drive log-file, crawl-budget, and deeplink-performance analysis by defining what to measure, such as crawler behavior (crawl waste, over-crawl patterns, index drift) and deeplink performance (resolution failure rate, attribution loss, in-app vs. web fallback rate), leveraging data pipelines created by the observability/data engineer.
• Raise the technical bar through engineering standards, leading design reviews, and mentoring engineers through delivery rather than through a reporting line.
• Partner with the Organic Growth product team on roadmap, KPIs, and business accountability for SEO/AEO and organic social channels, setting the “how” for the platform beneath their “what and why.”

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience owning technical SEO or crawl/rendering infrastructure; Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Experience with federated GraphQL and API gateway architectures, and familiarity with CDN, WAF, and bot-management layers.
• Familiarity with search engine indexing APIs, and with dynamic-rendering or prerender approaches.
• Direct experience with AppsFlyer (or Branch/Adjust) SDK integration, OneLink/deferred deep linking, and attribution reconciliation.
• Experience defining SLOs and real-time alerting for a customer-facing platform.
• Experience standing up or re-platforming an SEO engineering function.
• Strong backend engineering skills, with proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript (Node), and comfort owning production services.
• Rendering fluency with hands-on work using React/Next.js and the SEO implications of SSR/SSG/ISR/CSR, including debugging hydration and crawler-rendering issues.
• Data and analysis skills, including SQL against a cloud data warehouse for log-file, crawl-budget, and deeplink-performance analysis.
• CI/CD and automation experience, including building or owning regression gates and automated quality checks in the delivery pipeline.
• Technical leadership as an IC: ability to drive fixes and influence design across teams without positional authority, and ability to serve as a calm incident commander.
• AI-assisted engineering fluency, including the ability to evaluate AI coding assistant output and identify incorrect production code.
• Experience with deeplinking/attribution infrastructure is a strong plus even without an SEO background.

Technologies

• GraphQL, API gateway, CDN, WAF, bot-management
• AppsFlyer, Branch, Adjust, OneLink, deferred deep linking, attribution reconciliation
• SLOs, real-time alerting
• Python; JavaScript/TypeScript (Node)
• React, Next.js; SSR, SSG, ISR, CSR
• SQL; cloud data warehouse

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• Deep technical-SEO engineering expertise, including demonstrable ownership of crawl budget, indexation, structured data, rendering, and site migrations at scale (ideally high-traffic marketplace or content sites).
• Deeplinking and attribution expertise, including hands-on experience with mobile measurement partners (AppsFlyer or equivalent such as Branch/Adjust), deep-link generation, resolution, and attribution debugging.

Benefits

• Inclusive and competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage
• Family forming benefits
• 13 paid holidays
• Flexible Time Off
• 8 hours of paid volunteer time off
• Immediate eligibility into the Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location

Work Location and Schedule

• Hybrid role based in the Austin, TX office; candidates must be within commutable distance.
• Employees work three or more days in the office for in-person collaboration.