REA Group Staff Engineer, Natural Language & AI Search

Staff Engineer, Natural Language & AI Search — REA Group

Joined as Lead Developer on property.com.au within REAx, shipping the first AI search features to production, then stepped up to Staff IC to scale the Natural Language & AI Search program across REA.

Shipped at Scale

• Delivered semantic search to property.com.au, enabling vector-based, intent-aware property discovery for millions of users
• Shipped Find My Image, an image-based property search capability built in collaboration with the Cyber City data team
• Engineered a low-latency LLM pipeline translating free-text queries into structured search filters, optimised for production scale
• Designed and shipped conversational search, introducing a multi-turn LLM-driven interface to Australian real estate search
• Scaled the program from a single squad to a portfolio-level effort spanning multiple teams

Technical & Team Leadership

• Defined solution architecture and owned technical quality end-to-end, from design through to production health
• Set technical direction for LLM integration patterns, inference optimisation, and search infrastructure across the program
• Aligned engineering teams across REA on architectural decisions as the program grew in scope
• Led estimation, feature discovery, and technical planning alongside REAx product and design
• Managed engineers directly on the property.com.au team: career development, performance conversations, and skill gap identification
• Mentored engineers at multiple levels as the broader program scaled
• Partnered with a Principal Search Engineer to shape the long-term technical strategy for search at REA

Technologies & Domains

LLMs, RAG, embeddings, semantic/vector search, natural language processing, low-latency inference, distributed search infrastructure, TypeScript/Node.js