Open Book: Sarah Moore, Staff Software Engineer

Open Book is a series of interviews for you to get to know the incredible people of Opendoor. Check out our most recent conversation with Sarah Moore below. After sampling a few different career paths, Sarah fell back in love with engineering and joined Opendoor seven years ago. Here’s a sneak peek into what inspires her work and how she’s experienced growth on her team and at Opendoor.

Thanks for being here, Sarah! We’re excited to learn more about your story. Can you tell us about what led you to Opendoor?

My path to Opendoor was more of a winding road than a straight line. While I graduated college with a computer science degree, I knew engineering wasn’t in my immediate future. Instead, I moved to New York to pursue investment banking (and stayed for three years) before moving to Colorado where I skied during the day and waited tables at night. While I initially planned to stay in Colorado for just six months, I wound up spending three blissful years there. I eventually moved back to New York with the intention of doing something else in finance — until I realized that wasn’t really my passion.

Around that time I decided to revisit my roots in tech, and attended Recurse Center, a retreat for programmers. It was there that I was able to brush off my previous skills and fell back in love with coding. My partner and I moved to San Francisco in the midst of another start-up boom, and I decided it was time to seriously pursue engineering. I considered a couple of companies during my job search, but had a really good gut feeling after my interview at Opendoor. The company mission was intriguing and everyone was so kind, welcoming and smart–which still holds true today. I remember feeling at ease and as if Opendoor was a place where I belonged. I’m so glad I trusted my instinct, accepted the job, and am still here today.

Wow! Reflecting on the last seven years, what has changed during your time at Opendoor?

Continued growth has allowed for meaningful change in our team structure. We now have larger teams with streamlined focuses on specific aspects of the business, as opposed to smaller teams that spanned across multiple areas of work. It’s been incredible to see how clearer boundaries have empowered teammates to excel in using their skills and subject matter expertise to help deliver exceptional results for our customers.

What has stayed the same?

The tangible, real-world impact of our team’s work remains a strong source of motivation for me. Though we spend our time writing code behind the scenes, I’m always thinking about the people on the other side of the screen.

I’m amazed just thinking about how we help customers across the country to buy and sell their homes, and they are trusting Opendoor with one of the biggest financial transactions of their lives. Oftentimes, their experience is also an emotional one — whether our customer is an empty-nester couple looking to downsize, a first-time homebuyer, or a growing family in need of extra room.

It’s inspiring to be a part of each customer’s journey, and I feel fulfilled knowing the solutions we build help them move onto the next chapter of their lives.

Can you tell us a bit more about what you and the Checkout team are working on now?

My team and I focus on everything that goes into the sale transaction of Opendoor-owned homes. Not only do we support our Sales and Support team with the right tools to sell these homes, we also focus on the customer to create an exceptional experience to shop for and ultimately buy a home online. This means we need to think creatively to come up with new ideas and novel approaches to attract customers and enhance the home buying experience. It’s an exciting time to be an engineer at Opendoor.

One of my recent projects is centered on building technology that makes it easier for agents representing home shoppers to access available homes in-person. I think touring a home is one of the most magical steps in the home buying journey, and it’s challenging to confidently move forward with making an offer, signing a contract, and facilitating the actual sale if people can’t get a sense of a space and how it might suit them or their family. I love how we’re helping make this happen.

From internal discussion to customer feedback, how does your team decide what to prioritize and build?

To create the best possible experience, it’s important for us to understand each and every part of the real estate transaction and how people — including buyers, their agents, and even our internal teams who interact with customers — experience it.

Serving our fellow teammates, who are our internal customers, is something unique that I highly value. It creates a tight circle of feedback that guarantees we have an opportunity to build better and learn along the way. I trust that whether something is working well or needs improvement, I’ll certainly hear about it. Feedback is instrumental in helping us establish direction and decide what we need to work on.

How do you describe your approach to leadership?

I aim to strike a balance between equipping my teammates with opportunities to display their already-existing skills and finding opportunities where they can develop new skills. Creating space to show what you know instills confidence to try new things.

What do you think are some of the most exciting opportunities for growth at Opendoor?

In a dynamic and changing industry, there will always be something new to learn and exciting challenges to solve. At Opendoor, there’s also a lot of opportunity for internal mobility, whether you’d like to explore different projects and teams or a path to management.

I personally love and appreciate our development fund. Engineers can use it to attend conferences, take courses, or purchase books — anything that sparks their interest and will foster their growth.

What qualities or skills help someone succeed at Opendoor? On your team?

Curiosity, a willingness to learn, and a strong growth mindset. Meeting people who have a desire to try new things and branch out is more valuable to me than finding someone with knowledge in a specific tech stack. It’s also imperative to have a desire to deeply understand our business model and the challenges we’re working to solve.

As engineers, we’re best positioned to innovate when we understand both the motive behind and impact of our work. Together, these qualities cultivate both team and individual growth empowering collective success.

Your non-traditional path to engineering (and Opendoor!) is truly inspiring. What advice do you have for someone who hopes to build a similar career?

Be confident and stop holding yourself back! You know more than you think you do, you just have to get out there and prove it to the world.

This is especially true in the tech industry and at Opendoor, where people genuinely care much more about who you are and what you’re interested in, rather than where you came from. Don’t let feeling like you don’t have the right past experience or all the necessary technical skills for a specific role stop you from stepping out of your comfort zone.

Want to learn more about working at Opendoor? Check out our Product Management and Engineering and Data Science blogs.