Staff Software Engineer

At Second Nature, our people are our greatest differentiator. To build an industry-changing business, we don’t just need talent; we need an environment where high standards, continuous improvement, and customer obsession are the default.

Excellence is not a destination — it is how we show up every day. In twenty years time, we want every single employee to look back to their time at Second Nature and say: This is where I did my very best work. Where I grew the most. Where I pushed myself beyond what was comfortable. ✨

About Us

Today, we live in a world where everything has become convenient. Now you can get a ride anywhere, buy anything, and get an answer to your question with just a couple clicks on your phone. Convenience isn’t a luxury, it’s an expectation.

So why not renting? It's still a chore to get utilities set up, buy renters insurance, get air filters changed, handle pest control and more. That’s why we’ve built the world’s first Resident Experience Platform that makes resident onboarding, resident services, and ancillary revenue effortless for property managers. We’re passionate about turning friction into triple win experiences for residents, investors, and managers. That way renting can be easy and rewarding for everyone. And now you can join us. Apply today to join 300+ passionate, creative people who strive to make a difference each day so residents, property managers, and investors all win, creating the ultimate Triple Win!

About the Role

Second Nature is looking for a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer to help lead the technical development of our GRI Internet product.

You'll be a technical leader within the pod, partnering closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to translate business opportunities into scalable, maintainable software solutions.

You'll take ownership of critical backend architecture and systems, establish engineering standards, and help the team deliver reliable software with speed and confidence.

While the role is primarily backend-focused, you'll collaborate across the stack when needed and help ensure the entire product experience is cohesive, performant, and reliable.

We're looking for someone who combines strong technical judgment with a bias toward action: someone who can navigate ambiguity, simplify complex systems, and take ownership from initial design through production operations.

About the GRI Internet Pod

The Group Rate Internet (GRI) product is transforming how single-family rental property managers and their residents access high-speed internet.

Internet is an essential service that nearly every resident needs, yet getting connected can still involve confusing provider options, coverage uncertainty, installation delays, complicated billing, and frustrating customer support experiences.

We're changing that.

Through partnerships with multiple major internet service providers (ISPs), Second Nature offers property managers a fully managed internet program that delivers competitive group rates, simplifies resident enrollment, and creates new ancillary revenue opportunities.

Our platform coordinates the internet lifecycle: identifying service availability across property portfolios, connecting residents with the right ISP, managing enrollment and billing workflows, supporting residents throughout their tenancy, and simplifying the transition when they move out.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the GRI Internet pod, you'll help build and evolve the backend systems that make this experience possible. You'll work on complex integrations, business-critical workflows, and scalable services that connect property managers, residents, ISPs, and Second Nature's internal platform.

This is a primarily backend engineering role for someone who enjoys solving complex distributed systems problems, designing reliable integrations, and building software that supports real-world business operations at scale.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of scalable backend services and APIs that power the GRI Internet product.

• Establish and evolve architectural patterns that support extensibility, maintainability, and reliability as the product and its integrations grow.

• Design robust distributed systems and asynchronous workflows to coordinate complex business processes across internal services and external providers.

• Drive technical decisions around service boundaries, data modeling, API contracts, event-driven architecture, and system integration.

• Identify architectural bottlenecks and proactively improve system performance, resilience, and scalability.

ISP Integrations & Business-Critical Workflows

• Design and build reliable integrations with multiple internet service providers, accounting platforms, and other external systems.

• Develop resilient integration patterns that handle inconsistent third-party APIs, failures, retries, idempotency, rate limits, and data synchronization.

• Build backend workflows that support the full resident internet lifecycle, including:

  • Property coverage validation: Determine ISP availability and service options across large portfolios of single-family rental properties.

  • Resident enrollment: Support seamless enrollment and provisioning workflows triggered by lease and addendum events.

  • Internet setup: Coordinate resident onboarding and service activation with external ISPs.

  • Billing and payments: Support accurate, reliable billing workflows and synchronization with rent and property management systems.

  • Resident support: Enable internal teams and ISP partners to access accurate service, enrollment, and account information.

  • Resident offboarding: Automate service transitions, move-out workflows, and account lifecycle changes.

• Ensure integrations are observable, fault-tolerant, and maintainable as the number of providers, properties, and residents increases.

Engineering Excellence & Production Ownership

• Write, test, and maintain clean, high-quality code with a strong emphasis on automated testing and long-term maintainability.

• Own the reliability and performance of services in production, using monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting to identify and resolve issues proactively.

• Improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices to enable continuous delivery and confident releases.

• Drive a culture of operational excellence, ensuring production issues are understood, addressed, and prevented from recurring.

• Identify opportunities to simplify existing systems, reduce technical debt, and improve developer productivity.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Mentorship

• Partner with product managers and designers to shape technical solutions early in the product development process.

• Proactively raise risks, tradeoffs, and concerns early, and drive technical discussions to a decision rather than waiting to be asked.

• Translate ambiguous business requirements into clear technical designs, implementation plans, and incremental delivery strategies.

• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, thoughtful code reviews, and architectural collaboration.

• Communicate complex technical concepts and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Stay current with emerging technologies, particularly AI-assisted development and agentic engineering workflows, and identify practical opportunities to improve how we build software.
  

Key Outcomes
Success in this role means:

• Reliable integrations: ISP and third-party integrations are resilient, observable, and capable of handling real-world failures without compromising the resident or property manager experience.

• End-to-end lifecycle automation: Property coverage, resident enrollment, internet setup, billing, support, and offboarding workflows operate reliably with minimal manual intervention.

• Scalable backend architecture: Services and data models can support significant growth in properties, residents, transactions, and ISP partnerships without requiring constant architectural rework.

• Production excellence: Backend services and APIs ship on schedule, perform reliably in production, and catch defects in automated tests or code review rather than through customer-reported issues.

• Maintainable codebase: Engineers can confidently understand, extend, and build on existing systems without unnecessary complexity or a translation layer.

• Confident continuous delivery: Healthy CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and production monitoring support trunk-based development and frequent, low-risk deployments.

• Strong technical partnership: Product and design partners see engineering as an early thought partner in defining solutions, not simply a downstream implementation function.

• Elevated engineering standards: The team becomes more effective through better architectural decisions, improved development practices, and meaningful technical mentorship.

• Best Practices: Establish best practices for API design, database performance, code organization, testing, and code reviews.

• Major technical Contributions: Contribute to the broader engineering organization's technical strategy and help raise the engineering bar across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex backend systems and software architecture.

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Node.js, including designing and building production-grade APIs and backend services.

• Experience designing and operating distributed systems, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, and complex integration workflows.

• Experience with AWS and cloud-native application development.

• Strong experience with PostgreSQL and SQL, including relational data modeling, query optimization, indexing, and transaction management.

• Experience integrating with external APIs and third-party platforms, particularly systems with complex business workflows and inconsistent integration requirements.

• Deep understanding of software architecture patterns and design principles, including microservices, domain-driven design, hexagonal architecture, and distributed systems.

• Experience building reliable, observable production systems, including monitoring, logging, tracing, automated testing, and incident response.

• Experience with CI/CD, trunk-based development, and modern software delivery practices.

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to make sound technical decisions in ambiguous environments.

• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction beyond your immediate area of ownership.

• Experience using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar tools in your daily workflow, with genuine excitement about the future of agentic AI in software development.

We get it. Requirements can sometimes hold people back from applying to a job, but don’t let that be the case here. If you believe you have the skills it takes to elevate this role, team, and company, we encourage you to apply for this role.

Our Core Values

🏴‍☠️ Pirate Ship; not a cruise ship. Bias towards action.

💪 Massive Growth takes massive growth. We embrace challenges to increase our impact.

🥧 Grow the Pie. We focus on results so our customers & their customers win. Triple Win!

💜 Purple Heart. We put the team before ourselves.

🤝 Extreme Ownership. See something? Say something; right the ship to get us on course.

🙌 Be a moment maker. We aim to shatter the status quo.

Remote Work Statement

This position is a remote-first, work from home position. Second Nature is committed to creating a culture and workplace where remote work fosters collaboration and connections and is a key part of our company story and success. To be successful in a remote work role at Second Nature you must:

• Be available during your scheduled working hours and give your full attention to the completion of your Second Nature job duties

• Have a quiet, professional, distraction-free environment in which to complete your work

• Have access to your own reliable high-speed internet connection

• Attend our bi-annual in-person company meetings (Second Nature will reimburse the cost of your business travel per company guidelines)
  

Why Second Nature?

Health First: Medical, Dental, Vision, & Life Insurance; 401K Plan
Location: Work Remotely from anywhere in the US
Flexibility: Open PTO and sick days
The Product: Beyond the awards and 5-star reviews… our clients and customers love what they can do with a fully managed RBP
Diverse, Inclusive Culture: We embrace employees from all backgrounds with openness and respect
Training: A supportive team to help you grow your career and unlock your full potential
Growth: The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a fast-growing startup that’s designing and developing an exciting category

Second Nature is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We take action to ensure equal employment opportunities for all candidates and employees and to provide employees with a workplace free of discrimination and harassment. Our hiring decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, family or parental status, or any other status protected by federal and/or state law.