Software Engineer IV
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. We’re looking for a Software Engineer IV who is still a hands-on engineer at heart — writing code, making hard technical calls, and shipping — while also helping define what excellent looks like for the team. This role maps to what many organizations call a tech lead or senior engineer — the point where deep technical ownership and team leadership come together. You’ll spend the majority of your time as a practitioner, with a meaningful portion invested in the people and practices around you.
From here, you’ll have a clear path to Staff Engineer on the individual contributor track, or Engineering Manager if you’re drawn to people leadership.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership
- Remain a hands-on engineer: write code, contribute to design, and ship alongside your team.
- Architect solutions for your team’s most ambiguous and challenging problems, drawing on deep domain expertise.
- Shape the technical direction and vision for your team’s systems.
- Improve team efficiency by identifying pain points and resolving them — through automation, reducing toil, and tackling tech debt.
- Delegate low-risk technical decisions to engineers on your team, and own the high-risk ones yourself.
- Begin extending your influence beyond your team — identify opportunities to contribute to cross-team technical challenges and shared engineering practices.
- Lead and actively contribute to planning, reviews, and retrospectives as both a practitioner and a voice for engineering quality.
Knowledge & Standards
- Serve as an authority in your technical domain or on your team’s systems.
- Balance current delivery needs against longer-term implications, keeping the impact on other teams in mind.
- Ensure your team understands engineering standards and why they exist; update guidance when those standards evolve.
- Foster a culture of writing things down — distributed knowledge and clear documentation are force multipliers for the whole team.
- Share your expertise through Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and other cross-team forums.
Communication & Collaboration
- Communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
- Collaborate and coordinate across teams to unblock delivery and align on direction.
- Advocate for technical solutions and build buy-in across the organization.
- Arbitrate and de-escalate technical disagreements with empathy and clarity.
- Advocate strongly for your position, then commit fully once a decision is reached — and model that behavior for others.
Leadership & Culture
- Mentor engineers across your team and beyond, working with your manager to find the right opportunities.
- Advocate for a blameless culture grounded in empathy, psychological safety, and shared accountability.
- Help improve engineering processes — especially in ways that benefit teams beyond your own.
- Contribute to hiring by conducting technical interviews and helping evaluate candidates, with a focus on a strong candidate experience.
- Hold yourself and the team to a high standard of delivery, maintaining momentum and a bias toward shipping working software.
- Be a culture carrier: your attitude and energy set the tone for those around you. Show up with the curiosity, positivity, and high standards you want to see in the team.
What You Bring
- 6+ years of professional software development experience; 3+ years in a senior engineering role preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to design and architect solutions for complex, distributed systems.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and raising the quality of those around you.
- A commitment to continuous improvement — in your own craft, your team’s capabilities, and the engineering practices around you.
- Strong communication skills — written and verbal — with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience collaborating across teams and navigating technical disagreements constructively.
- 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.