Senior Customer Engineer

The Team + The Role

Pendo’s Customer Engineering team is the technical backbone of the pre- and post-sales customer motion. The team brings together work that has historically sat across Customer Success, Technical Account Management, and Solutions Engineering into one full-lifecycle technical owner. Customer Engineering helps customers connect technical execution to business outcomes and realize the value of their investment in Pendo.

As a Senior Customer Engineer, you own strategic and complex Enterprise accounts across acquisition, implementation, adoption, expansion, and escalation. You lead technical strategy for complex deployments, resolve ambiguous customer challenges, and partner closely with account teams to drive retention, expansion, and customer value. Your impact extends beyond your own accounts through playbooks, coaching, repeatable fixes, and workflow improvements that raise the capability of the broader Customer Engineering team.

This is a remote role supporting a central region.

What this looks like day-to-day

• New customer acquisition and selling: Partner with Account Directors on pre-sales motions for new customer acquisition, product expansion, and expansion across lines of business. You identify customer pain, craft and deliver tailored demos, and lead technical evaluations through requirements gathering, success criteria, installation guidance, and hands-on workshops.
• Complex implementations and value realization: Lead onboarding for strategic customers, including planning, implementation, integrations, and training. You build customer-specific implementation playbooks, guide complex deployments with executive visibility, and ensure customers realize value during onboarding and over time.
• Adoption, expansion, and growth: Identify opportunities to expand adoption across underutilized features, untapped products, and new lines of business. When adoption stalls, you diagnose root causes, design a path forward, and connect technical work to measurable business outcomes.
• Technical escalation: Serve as an escalation point for complex technical challenges raised by other Customer Engineers. You resolve ambiguous problems with multiple variables and tradeoffs, involving Product or Engineering only when truly needed.
• Team capability building: Build playbooks, document repeatable fixes, coach peers, and improve how Customer Engineering work gets done across the team. You use AI tools to accelerate content creation, surface patterns across accounts, and share practical workflow findings with the broader team.
• Early account impact: Assess account health, risks, stakeholder relationships, and the highest-priority problems to solve within your portfolio. You establish trust with Account Directors and customer stakeholders, then independently lead complex customer interactions that move accounts forward.
• Quarterly business outcomes: Drive measurable improvement in customer health, retention, expansion, and technical resolution across strategic accounts. You contribute reusable frameworks, playbooks, or processes that other Customer Engineers use and become a trusted advisor to Account Directors on account health and technical strategy.

Who You Are

Beyond the qualifications, we hire through a specific lens. These aren't buzzwords; they're the things we'll actually look for in how you talk about your work.

You're a builder, not a maintainer.

You're most energized when there isn't a clear path yet, and you get to define it. You don't wait for direction; you identify gaps, shape solutions, and drive them forward. At Pendo, great Senior Customer Engineers don't just follow instructions; they operate as strategic advisors, influencing decisions, guiding stakeholders, and elevating how we work.

You're AI-curious - genuinely.

You're not using AI tools occasionally. You're rewiring how you work around them. You're faster, sharper, and more prolific because of it, and you bring that energy to everything — how you approach your work, how you prep, how you communicate, how you think. We want someone who sees AI as a multiplier, not a shortcut.

Must-haves

• 5 to 8 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Engineering, Technical Account Management, Customer Engineering, implementation, professional services, or solutions architecture.
• Deep hands-on experience with web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and REST APIs, with the ability to architect and troubleshoot complex front-end implementations.
• Proven experience managing strategic accounts with executive-level stakeholders, competing priorities, and complex technical or business requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to solve ambiguous problems involving multiple variables, constraints, and tradeoffs.
• Experience connecting technical execution to business outcomes such as retention, expansion, ROI, and value realization.
• Hands-on use of AI tools for account research, content creation, or workflow automation, with demonstrated integration into day-to-day work rather than light experimentation.
• Experience mentoring or coaching more junior technical team members.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with Pendo, digital adoption platforms, product analytics, or in-app experience tooling in an enterprise environment.
• Hands-on experience with mobile app development, including Swift, Android, or React Native.
• Familiarity with data architecture, AI or machine learning concepts, or advanced analytics instrumentation.
• Track record of building reusable frameworks, playbooks, or processes that were adopted by a broader team.

About Pendo

Pendo was founded in 2013 by former product managers, who combined their heads and hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers: a simple way to understand and attack what truly drives product success. Our mission is to improve society's experience with software. Come join one of the fastest-growing startups, supported by best-in-class institutions like Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital and Meritech.

Pendo Core Values: Bias to Act, Hone Your Craft, The Team is Pendo, and Maniacal Focus.

Location: Remote

Compensation: The expected On-Target Earnings (OTE) range for this role is $193,393 - $241,742, with a 70/30 base-to-variable compensation split.

Benefits: Pendo offers highly competitive United States benefits, including employer-heavy coverage with $0 premium options, strong 401(k) match, equity, and flexible time off.

EEOC: We are an equal opportunity employer and believe having diverse teams where everyone brings their whole self to Pendo is key to our success. We welcome all people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.

Accessibility: Pendo is committed to working with, and providing access and reasonable accommodation to, applicants with mental and/or physical disabilities. If you think you may require an accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, please send a request to: accommodation@pendo.io. All requests for accommodations are treated discreetly and confidentially, as practical and permitted by law.

About the Role

Realtor.com is looking for a Director of Engineering, Consumer Enablement to lead the platform and enablement organization that powers all consumer-facing web and mobile experiences. This is a high-impact engineering leadership role responsible for three core pillars: Web & Mobile Platforms, Consumer Services, and Quality Enablement — the foundational systems and tooling that every consumer product team at Realtor.com builds on.

You will lead a multi-team org of ~40 engineers (FTE + contractors), managing senior engineering managers and staff engineers across web platform, mobile platform, component systems, backend services, and quality engineering. You'll report to the VP of Consumer Engineering.

This role is equal parts technical depth and organizational influence. You're not shipping features — you're building the paved path that lets dozens of engineers ship faster, safer, and with higher quality.

What You'll Do

Platform Strategy & Execution

• Own the technical roadmap for web and mobile platform infrastructure, including the MFE architecture (web-islands), CI/CD pipelines, React Router 7 migration (Project Oracle), and headless CMS platform
• Drive the next evolution of Realtor.com's design system (rdc-ui V4: Panda CSS migration) and component ecosystem used across 41 codebases
• Lead the decomposition of legacy monolithic services (Hestia) and the transition to domain-owned GraphQL subgraphs via Pantheon federation

Engineering Enablement

• Define and deliver the "paved path" — standardized patterns, tooling, and guardrails that reduce cognitive load for 100+ consumer engineers
• Own DORA metrics for the org
• Partner with stream-aligned teams (Buyers & Sellers, Search, Personalization, New Homes, Rentals, Mobile squads) as an internal platform provider

Quality at Scale

• Evolve the quality enablement model — shifting quality left through automation, AI tooling, and developer-owned testing
• Oversee the testing pyramid: reducing E2E test reliance, scaling Playwright frameworks, and rolling out the AI Quality Toolkit

Cloud Cost & FinOps

• Own the engineering cost envelope for Consumer Enablement — AWS spend, CircleCI credits, and third-party tooling budgets
• Partner with FinOps and infrastructure teams to instrument cost attribution, identify rightsizing opportunities, and enforce cost-aware development practices across the paved path
• Establish unit cost baselines for key platform operations (e.g., cost-per-deploy, cost-per-test-run) and drive measurable efficiency improvements quarter over quarter

People & Organization

• Lead and develop 3 senior engineering managers and multiple staff engineers across 7 sub-teams
• Create clear career frameworks and growth paths that retain top engineers and set expectations at every level
• Build inclusive team cultures with high psychological safety — where engineers do their best work, managers are effective coaches, and feedback flows in all directions
• Drive hiring rigor: define role profiles, calibrate leveling, and make high-quality talent decisions in partnership with recruiting
• Manage headcount planning, contractor-to-FTE ratios, and capacity allocation across competing priorities in a lean org

AI Strategy & Developer Enablement

• Partner with engineering managers to embed AI practices into daily workflows — code review, documentation, incident response, sprint planning
• Represent the Consumer Engineering perspective in AI investment decisions: what to build internally, what to buy, and what to deprecate

What We're Looking For

Required

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5 years leading engineering teams, including managing managers
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• Demonstrated experience owning platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling organizations — not just product delivery teams
• Deep understanding of modern frontend architecture: micro-frontends, component systems, React, TypeScript, CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with backend GraphQL/API services and federated architecture patterns
• Strong track record of improving engineering velocity and developer experience at scale (DORA metrics, lead time, deployment frequency)
• Excellent cross-functional communication and stakeholder management — able to influence without authority, represent platform value to product and business leaders, and navigate competing priorities across multiple stream-aligned teams

Preferred

• Experience with AI developer tooling strategy: evaluating, deploying, and driving adoption of AI-assisted development tools across an engineering organization
• Hands-on background with FinOps practices: cloud cost attribution, unit economics for platform operations, CI/CD spend optimization, and engineering budget ownership
• Experience with mobile platform engineering (iOS/Android release processes, CircleCI, React Native or native)
• Familiarity with Apollo Federation, GraphQL schema governance, and Pantheon-style API gateway patterns
• Background in quality engineering transformation — shifting from manual QA models to developer-owned quality
• Experience with headless CMS platforms and content-driven architecture
• Familiarity with AWS infrastructure (EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudFront, ArgoCD)

Tech Stack You'll Own

React · TypeScript · Node.js · GraphQL (Apollo Federation) · NestJS · Swift · Kotlin · AWS (EKS/Lambda/DynamoDB) · CircleCI · ArgoCD · Playwright · Panda CSS · styled-components · New Relic · Splunk

Why This Role

• Org-wide leverage: Everything consumer runs on what this team builds. Your decisions affect 100+ engineers daily
• Clear technical vision: Active initiatives with real momentum — Oracle, CMS, rdc-ui V4, Hestia decomposition — not greenfield ambiguity
• AI-forward culture: The org is actively building and deploying AI-powered tooling with 100% AI adoption as a company goal
• Senior team: You'll work alongside Staff and Sr. Staff engineers who are already deep domain experts
• Real ownership: Full responsibility over people, platform roadmap, and cost envelope — not a coordinator role

What You'll Do:

• Engineer End-to-End Solutions: Design and develop scalable, responsive web applications using React and Node.js/Python that simplify complex enterprise workflows.
• Architect Micro-Frontends: Implement modern frontend architectures that integrate seamlessly with our Salesforce ecosystem and internal microservices.
• Optimize Data Pipelines: Build and maintain high-throughput APIs and event-driven services (using Kafka or AWS EventBridge) that power real-time business dashboards.
• Embed Intelligence: Integrate Generative AI and machine learning models directly into the UI to provide predictive insights and automated task suggestions for our users.
• Champion Quality & DevOps: Drive the adoption of "Shift-Left" testing, CI/CD automation, and observability tools to ensure our enterprise tools are as resilient as our consumer-facing products.
• Collaborate & Mentor: Partner with Product Managers and UX Designers to translate business requirements into technical reality, while mentoring mid-level engineers through code reviews and pair programming.

What You'll Bring:

• Full Stack Mastery: 8+ years of professional experience building and scaling production-grade applications using modern frameworks like React/Next.js and Node.js, Go, Python or Java.
• System Design Fluency: Deep understanding of distributed systems, REST/GraphQL API design, and how to optimize for performance across the entire stack.
• Cloud-Native Mindset: Hands-on experience with AWS (Lambda, ECS, DynamoDB) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) in a CI/CD environment.
• Database Expertise: Proficiency with both relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and NoSQL solutions, including experience handling large-scale data migrations.
• Modern Web Expertise: Strong command of CSS-in-JS, TypeScript, and state management libraries (Redux/Zustand), with a focus on accessibility and performance.
• Agile Leadership: Proven ability to lead features from conception to deployment in an Agile/Scrum environment, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed and technical debt.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

How We Reward You:

Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and well-being of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:

• 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 Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degree and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location