Open Book: Trevor Creech, Staff Software Engineer

Open Book is a series of interviews for you to get to know the incredible people of Opendoor. In this spotlight, we’re sharing our conversation with Trevor Creech, one of Opendoor’s earliest Engineering team members. Read on to learn about what inspired Trevor to join the team, what he sees as Opendoor’s biggest opportunity, and why our CEO Eric Wu shares a story from Trevor’s bachelor party in Vegas with new hires during their onboarding experience!

Hi Trevor! We’re happy to chat with you today. You’ve been part of the Opendoor team for more than five years; can you tell us a bit about your path to Opendoor and why you decided to join the team?

It’s been quite a ride! Before I joined Opendoor, I was the co-founder of a small start-up, but was looking to work on something a bit more impactful. There were two things about Opendoor that really stood out, which ultimately convinced me to join the Engineering team here.

The first thing was the people. I had a few friends who already worked here, and they spoke highly about their colleagues and the company. Within Engineering specifically, I was impressed with both the technical caliber of the early Opendoor team and the collaborative culture across the organization.

The second compelling reason was the audacity of Opendoor’s mission: to empower everyone with the freedom to move. I remember being almost incredulous that this company was just buying houses and holding them on its balance sheet, but as an impact-driven engineer I was excited about the huge opportunity for this business to scale. Now, five years later, my wife and I are going through the homebuying process for the first time and get to experience these pain points ourselves. This experience has really driven home the value that Opendoor brings to our customers, and makes me even more excited for the new products we’re building today!

Looking back, what did you see as the biggest opportunity at Opendoor when you joined five years ago?

There’s a great Sheryl Sandberg quote: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat. Just get on.” I knew Opendoor was going places, and I wanted to be a part of it.

The opportunity we saw was to transform the stressful and lengthy process of selling a home into one that was simple, certain, and fast. Opendoor was the company to pioneer this new approach, and it was amazing to see the glowing reviews roll in from early customers. Pretty wild that just five years later we’ve completed over 100,000 transactions for our customers.

What do you think is the biggest opportunity for Opendoor now?

There are many directions we could take to grow the company and help more customers move, but I mostly think about two of them. The first is doubling down on our core seller product that people already love. We’re in over 40 markets today, but this simple, stress-free way to sell your home should be available in every city across the US.

The other opportunity is taking bold new bets like Opendoor-backed offers, which launched earlier this year to help buyers win homes with competitive, all-cash offers. That’s just one example, but we’re constantly dreaming up new ways to improve the experience of selling, buying, moving, and everything in between.

Are there any specific opportunities you’ve had at Opendoor that have led to measurable personal or professional growth?

When I first joined Opendoor I got to work really closely with our operations teams, which was an amazing crash course on the real estate industry. From building internal support tools to customer-facing dashboards, I got to understand the business in depth. Since most of our Engineering team was based in San Francisco at the time, we would fly to different markets — usually Phoenix or Dallas — to shadow operators, talk to customers, visit homes, and truly embed ourselves in the Opendoor experience. This laser focus on the customer is a core part of working at Opendoor, and these were formative experiences for me.

Since then, I’ve switched from Product Engineering to Infrastructure, where we build tools for other engineers at the company. In true Opendoor fashion, we treat them as our customers and bring that same obsession to making them faster, happier, and more productive. Working on this team has given me the chance to take on big projects and migrations that cut across many teams and systems. It’s exciting to see velocity increase across the Engineering team as we make tooling improvements, and the downstream impact that has on the customer experience.

How would you describe the culture on the Engineering team at Opendoor? What, if anything, do you think people may be surprised to learn?

Our company culture — and across the Engineering organization — is incredibly supportive. We’re deliberate about finding growth opportunities for people, whether it be leading a project, switching to a different team, or even changing roles completely (we’ve had a couple amazing Ops folks who switched to Engineering). On my team we do lots of pair programming which I find is one of the best ways to learn from each other and level up.

I think people might be surprised by the breadth of technical challenges we tackle at Opendoor. We build world-class systems for machine learning, data science, support tooling, transaction management, construction tooling, financial systems, mobile apps, growth, and infrastructure, and we have to get it all right for Opendoor to be successful. There’s an opportunity to think outside the box, make an impact, and deliver real results in whatever area you find interesting.

What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about joining Opendoor?

Come with a startup mentality! Though we’re a larger, public company now, we work hard to keep that startup feel, moving fast and staying scrappy. One of the best pieces of advice I received early on — which still holds true today — was to always challenge the status quo. There’s lots of low hanging fruit in startups, so if something feels broken, trust your gut and go fix it!

That’s great advice. Last, but certainly not least, would you share your favorite Opendoor memory with us?

Of course. I got married in 2019, and had my bachelor party in Las Vegas with some friends from Canada who flew down. We decided to visit a few Opendoor homes during our stay, and while we were in one of the backyards, I noticed a couple of nails on the bottom of the pool. One of our core values at Opendoor is “act from ownership” and so I — in every sense of the word — ended up in the pool so I could get rid of the nails.

This part is kind of funny, but the story circulated internally and made it all the way to our CEO, Eric Wu, and I’ve heard rumors that he still shares it with new hires during onboarding.

Interested in joining our team? Opendoor is hiring across all teams, including Trevor’s! Check out our current open positions!

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