Join Us, and Together We Can Rule the Galaxy!

Redfin can be a fun place to work. Not because we have catered lunches or dazzling offices or happy hours or ski trips or push-up contests or cycling races or cook-outs or high-speed, demolition-derby scavenger hunts, but mostly because we try very hard to be a good place to work: my bonus depends on employee happiness.
It’s fun working on a cult site that people love, fun making customers deliriously happy, and fun being surrounded by smart, passionate people. It’s fun having a big, simple mission that everyone believes in, fun doubling the business every year, and fun giving everyone a say in what we do next.  It’s fun launching a new, multi-million dollar business every 18 months, and fun promoting someone from within to run it, which I hope we do every time.
But it’s hard hiring people. We can never get enough candidates, and we mostly say no. The business is growing like gangbusters, and we can’t keep up. So we’re publishing the job descriptions for a few of my favorite openings in the hope that you can help us find smart people who get things done. If you enjoy this blog, please help us out by forwarding this post around to your friends. If we hire someone you recommend, we’ll send you a gift certificate for the nicest dinner in town.
Search Software Engineer, San Francisco
We’re hiring software engineers for our downtown San Francisco office, which is where the magic happens for the entire Redfin user experience. About half of our engineers and two of our engineering executives work in San Francisco, and this is where the thought leadership is around making search social, fun and mobile. Increasingly, the San Francisco team is working on a problem that must be one of the most interesting in all of e-commerce:  getting more people to make the leap from searching a website to using that site to buy a house. Since I’m from San Francisco, I get together with the San Francisco team all the time. To get this gig, you need to be a stone-cold great coder, but also someone who likes to think about design and business strategy, with the potential to manage folks over time. Apply to sasha (dot) aickin @ redfin (dot) com.
Commerce Software Engineer, Seattle
Here in Seattle, we’re also hiring a rock-star engineer to help our commerce team build a self-service system for every step of the home-buying and -selling process. This is the system that will reinvent real estate beyond just the initial search, giving consumers transparency, control and convenience at every turn; it’s a big part of how Redfin will be the best brokerage in the country, not just the most efficient. And it’s the only way Redfin will scale its business to hundreds of our own agents and thousands of partner agents, allowing us to monitor customer-service glitches and enforce consistent standards of care, all while capturing real-time market data that we can surface back to consumers just beginning their search. Apply to gordon (dot) brown @ redfin (dot) com.
Business Analyst
On the business side, we need a number-cruncher and a big-thinker to work for one of my favorite managers at Redfin, Adam Wiener. Adam is in charge of all our new business initiatives, but he also analyzes every aspect of real estate operations. This means that every fun question that Redfin has to answer would go through you: how many customers our agents can handle really well before we refer business to partners, what we should charge for selling a home, which markets we should open next, what business model makes sense for loans and escrow services. To dig into these problems, we need someone with Freakonomics levels of curiosity and resourcefulness, big-picture thinking, and the ability to launch a Space Shuttle using Excel macros.  Apply to adam (dot) wiener @ redfin (dot) com.
Business Product Manager
If you’ve got an entrepreneurial spark, the best Redfin job might be as a business product manager for our home-buying service. This is a business generating tens of millions of dollars, in which we have done very little customer research about the characteristics of the service people want to use, or how to promote that service on our site. So your first order of business would be to figure out how to broaden our offering, and then to launch whatever new services for which you find a market. You need to be comfy with designing online and offline components of a user experience, field evangelism and training, and website analytics and optimization. This takes executive range, big brains, charisma, business savvy. Apply to matt (dot) goyer @ redfin (dot) com.
Training & Development Manager
And last but not least, we’re hiring someone to run training and employee development. In an industry where training is almost unheard of, training will be one of Redfin’s major competitive assets: how we recruit the best young agents, and how we make each one better every year. We’ll deliver training via in-person classes, a web portal, online templates, tests and study guides, all integrated into promotions and compensation changes, with extensive executive support. Since this is a people-driven business suddenly taking on a lot of people, your impact on our brand, our culture and our success will be huge. Apply to angela (dot) cough @ redfin (dot) com.
So those are some of my favorite job openings at Redfin. Except I left off the new stats product manager, the PR manager, the test engineer and all the agent positions in real estate — we alreadyget many, many applicants to be an agent. If you know of someone who might find a happy place at Redfin, please send ’em our way! We are an equal opportunity employer.
(Photo credit: Laverrue on Flickr)