Senior Python Engineer Jobs in Santa Barbara, CA

About AppFolio

AppFolio's main product is the AppFolio Property Manager: web-based software for managers of apartment buildings to schedule maintenance, track their finances, and communicate with their tenants. We also make a companion app for tenants to pay their rent, buy renter's insurance, and request maintenance. We love our work because it helps millions of people with these everyday tasks. Our product vision sums it up nicely:

AppFolio creates a world where choosing, living in, owning, and managing communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive.

Since 2019, we have been energetically supercharging our products with AI. We have introduced features such as smart bill upload - SBE, a fully featured AI leasing agent - LISA, a LLM backed chat interface to support property managers using our product - Realm X, and recently an LLM backed workflow system - Realm Flows. These and other features enable us to provide experiences that allow our property managers to automate the mundane and focus more on the tasks that only they are capable of. 

About the culture

• Engineers work in small, focused, cross-functional teams comprised of a product manager, user-experience designer, quality-assurance engineer, and 3-6 software engineers. 

• We work closely with customers. For example, engineers are encouraged to participate in customer calls!

• We've adopted some agile practices (pair programming, automated software tests, Jira / Trello / kanban boards, retrospective meetings, stand-up meetings), but we aren't dogmatic about agile/scrum. Teams are empowered to decide how they want to work.

• We work hard, but we encourage a healthy work-life balance.

• We support fully remote work, but we have very nice offices in Santa Barbara, CA and San Diego, CA.

About this job

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join a 6-person cross-functional product development team focused on continuing to enhance the accounting module of our Appfolio Property Manager product. This team owns the features that allow our customers to directly integrate with their financial institutions and pull that data into our product. They are currently working to enhance these features to support additional account types and methods of data intake.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you would onboard quickly to our technology stack and our feature set, align your team on a shared understanding of the problem and solution space, and work closely with your fellow devs and cross-functional partners team to execute on these initiatives. This will require technical expertise and leadership, as well as superb communication skills.

Your impact

• Become a master of your software engineering craft, and work with other software engineers who are smart enough to teach you, and humble enough to learn from you.  

• Develop scalable, robust, and simple web-based solutions to solve complex business problems for our customers.  

• Formulate, implement, and evaluate algorithms and database queries to support SaaS scalability and stability.  

• Implement new features and optimize existing ones to drive maximum scalability, stability, and performance.  

• Use test-driven development, code reviews, and continuous integration to deliver high-quality software and rapidly fix bugs as they come up.  

• Work closely with, and incorporate feedback from, other engineering team members, QA, product owners, and our APM customers.  

• Leverage agile practices to release small batches of value to customers continuously. – test-driven development, pair programming, live code review, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.  

Qualifications

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or related technical discipline.

• At least >5 years of experience as a full-stack software engineer. 

• Hands-on work/internship experience developing web-based applications, preferably in a SaaS environment.  

• Creativity and the ability to solve complex problems without a roadmap.

• Knowledge of Ruby on Rails and experience working with a language like Ruby, Java, or Python.  

• Experience with some areas of our tech, like Ruby on Rails, React, Redux, AWS, and SOA.

• Familiarity with Agile software development processes (Scrum or Kanban).

• Familiarity with Test-Driven Development.

• Experience working across all levels of the development stack is preferred.  

• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners like PM, UX to drive technical solutions

Nice to Have:

• Experience working across all levels of the development stack  

• Experience with some areas of our tech like Ruby on Rails, React, Redux, AWS, SOA  

• Familiarity with Agile software development processes: Scrum or Kanban  

• Familiarity with Test-Driven-Development

• Experience with AI-driven development: exposure to integrating Large Language Models into production workflows

• Familiarity with standard AI terminology (Agents, Embeddings, Context Windows) and tooling is highly preferred

Compensation & Benefits      

The base salary that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is $138,400 - $173,000.      

The actual base salary for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s skills, education, experience, etc.       

Please note that base pay is one important aspect of a compelling Total Rewards package. The base pay range indicated here does not include any additional benefits or bonuses that you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.