Software Engineer II
About the Role
Invitation Homes set out to solve a real problem: home leasing options were limited and the experience for renters was inconsistent. Today, as the nation’s largest single-family home rental company, our engineering teams build the technology at the center of that solution — personalized resident experiences, service tools, and the operational systems that residents and associates depend on every day. When we ship, people feel it.
We’ve built an engineering culture that takes that responsibility seriously: collaborative teams, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you. Great software is built by engineers who are supported, growing, and proud of what they ship. This role maps to what many organizations call a mid-level Software Engineer — you’ve moved beyond close supervision and are ready to own meaningful work independently, while still learning and growing with support from the team. You’ll spend nearly all of your time as a hands-on practitioner, with an increasing awareness of the people and practices around you.
From here, you’ll have a clear path to Software Engineer III, where you’ll step into technical leadership and begin investing more deliberately in the engineers around you.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership
- Write code, contribute to design, and ship — nearly all of your work is hands-on.
- Work independently on well-scoped features, tasks, and bugs to help your team achieve its goals.
- Assist in planning and design phases by asking questions and suggesting improvements.
- Improve the flow of work for your team — check in with teammates, review PRs promptly, and help keep things moving.
- Share input on decision records, documentation, and processes that affect you and your team.
- Participate actively in planning, reviews, and retrospectives as an engaged and reliable team member.
Knowledge & Standards
- Execute your work with growing comfort and confidence in your team’s tools and technologies.
- Approach unfamiliar problems with curiosity before defaulting to familiar solutions.
- Understand how to test and validate your work thoroughly.
- Understand our incident management and change management processes.
- Protect data integrity and security by understanding how different environments (dev, QA, production) are used within your area.
- Understand where your project fits in the broader business context.
Communication & Collaboration
- Review the work of other engineers using agreed-upon processes, such as pull request reviews.
- Give feedback that is clear, kind, and actionable.
- Write and explain technical documentation in ways that are easy to understand.
- Contribute to team discussions and encourage others to do the same.
- Escalate issues in a timely manner when you need help with deliverables or priorities.
Leadership & Culture
- Be a model engineer for those who are newer to the role or looking up to you.
- Take time to help others, especially more junior engineers.
- Participate in the Engineering community — Special Interest Groups (SIGs), the Technical Architecture Guild (TAG), and other forums — and encourage others to do the same.
- Champion agreed-upon decisions and best practices, even when a different approach might feel tempting.
- Maintain a bias to action — keep things moving, remove small blockers yourself where you can, and avoid letting work stall waiting on others.
What You Bring
- 2+ years of professional software development experience.
- Demonstrated ability to work independently on well-scoped features from design through delivery.
- Solid understanding of software testing, validation, and debugging.
- Familiarity with incident management, change management, and environment hygiene (dev, QA, production).
- Clear, effective communication skills — written and verbal — with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical audiences.
- A curious mindset — you approach unfamiliar problems with openness before defaulting to familiar solutions.
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD practices, and modern iterative software delivery.
- A degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Our Stack
Our engineering teams work with TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS — including Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS. We practice CI/CD, favor infrastructure as code, and build on REST APIs and event-driven architectures. Salesforce is a significant part of our technology landscape — some teams build directly on the platform, while others integrate with Salesforce-managed APIs. Experience with these is a strong plus — though we care more about depth of thinking, adaptability, and the drive to keep learning than familiarity with any specific tool.