Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer - Machine Learning

- Join an organisation with a thriving culture centred around high performance and care

We're REA
With bold and ambitious goals, REA Group is changing the way the world experiences property. No matter where you're at on your property journey, we're here to help with every step – whether that's finding or financing your next home.

Our people are the key to our success. At the heart of everything we do, is a thriving culture centred around high performance and care. We are purpose driven and collaborative, which drives innovation and our ability to make a real impact. As such, we’re proud to have been named in Australia’s “Top 5” Best Workplaces two years in a row, as well as being recognised as a Best Workplace for Women.

Where the team fits in

The Listing Discovery team is part of the Listings, Visualisation & Content portfolio within the Consumer Product & Experience group. This portfolio focuses on enhancing the search and listing experiences on realestate.com.au, supported by platform technologies that deliver scalable, high‑quality user experiences.

At the heart of how millions of Australians find their next home, this team plays a critical role in shaping one of the most visited and trusted property destinations in the country. The features and decisions driven here have national‑scale reach, influence how people engage with our brand, and deliver meaningful outcomes across the organisation – making a direct and lasting impact on our audience and business success.

What the role is all about

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in the Listing Discovery team, you’ll join a cross‑functional, multidisciplined team to deliver user‑facing experiences and solve real needs for millions of users. You will lead the development of real‑time, production‑grade AI systems using Generative AI, Large Language Models and Agentic AI architectures. These solutions will power smart recommendations and contextual listing insights, enabling personalised and engaging experiences for millions of users. You’ll also influence technical direction and mentor engineers in the team to ensure scalability, reliability and innovation in our core experience.

You’ll work closely with teams across Consumer Experience, Data Services and PropTrack, contributing to REA’s broader AI strategy. Your work will help operationalise cutting‑edge research and surface meaningful, context‑aware intelligence that empowers users throughout their property journey.

What you’ll be doing

The Staff ML Engineer supports the business in the following ways:

- Lead strategically important initiatives, driving the vision, architecture, and execution.

- Collaborate across specialisations, working closely with native, web and backend engineers to deliver features through to the glass.

- Collaborate with cross‑functional leaders and stakeholders to understand needs, inform direction and design high quality solutions.

- Inform product discovery, delivery planning and technical solution design by providing a balanced view feasibility, effort and quality considerations.

- Deliver and maintain scalable end‑to‑end AI products, taking ideas from prototype to production in fast, iterative cycles.

- Utilize Generative AI, LLMs, and VLMs, combining them with traditional ML techniques to deliver impactful solutions.

- Keeping abreast of the latest technology advancements, generally and across REA Group.

- Be a technical leader and support the Engineering Manager in setting the technical direction and practices and upskilling the team’s capabilities. Championing industry best‑practices, ethics and engineering excellence.

- Knowledge sharing, growing & mentoring other engineers within the team and the wider REA community.

Who we’re looking for

- MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Computational Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, or a similar discipline.

- Experience shipping production ML products, with a deep understanding of the end‑to‑end lifecycle from data gathering and training to MLOps and production deployment.

- Experience deploying and maintaining AI systems in real‑time, production environments.

- Expert in SQL, Python, and/or other relevant software/languages. Experience with key ML frameworks and libraries.

- Extensive experience with dev‑ops tools and techniques, particularly Docker, Git, GCP, AWS, and CI/CD.

- Leadership and mentoring skills with a passion for developing talent and building inclusive, high performing teams.

- Experience leading teams to produce production‑quality code and services, with a track record of setting high standards for testing, evaluation, and monitoring.

- Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate a technical solutions and strategy to both non‑technical leaders and fellow engineers.

- A desire to understand our business needs to shape the strategy and vision for tools and systems that solve real user problems.

- Experience collaborating with other specialisations and an interest in building a multi‑discipline team.

- Experience with developing APIs, streaming data (eg Flink, Kafka), and generative AI is a plus.

The REA experience

The physical, mental, emotional and financial health of our people is something we’ll never stop caring about. This is a place to learn and grow.

- A hybrid and flexible approach to working.

- Flexible leave options including, birthday leave and purchase additional leave.

- Flexible parental leave offering for primary and secondary carers.

- Our Because We Care program offers employees volunteering leave, community grants, matched payroll giving and our Community Café donates 100% of revenue to charity.

- Hackdays so you can bring your big ideas to life.

Our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We are committed to providing a working environment that embraces and values diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe teams with diverse ideas and experiences are more creative, more effective and fuel disruptive thinking. If you've got the skills, dedication and enthusiasm to learn but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch.

Like a lot of companies, we have perps out there who like to ‘phish’ and have had a few recent instances of people pretending to be from REA and making offers of employment, on the condition that they transfer money for security checks.

Find out more about our tech teams who build products that millions of people use every day.

Our corporate headquarters in Melbourne is a bright open space, open to possibilities.

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