Company Overview:
Hillwood, a Perot Company, is a premier real estate investment and development company founded on a culture of integrity, respect, excellence and teamwork. The company is a full-service real estate developer, investor and advisor focused on developing opportunities for investors, partners and communities around the world. See additional details at www.hillwood.com.
Position Summary:
Hillwood IT is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our growing in-house IT team in Dallas, TX and partner directly with business teams and build applications that solve meaningful business problems and improve operational efficiency. This hands-on role combines full-stack software engineering with the business engagement and delivery ownership of a forward-deployed engineer.
The role is heavily focused on working directly with Hillwood business teams and building on Hillwood’s Core Platform, our internal agentic coding platform where AI tools such as Claude Code are used throughout the software development lifecycle. Working alongside our Application Development, Enterprise Data Lakehouse (EDL), and AI teams, this individual will identify high-value business workflows, translate ambiguous needs into prioritized solutions, and own delivery from initial discovery through user adoption and ongoing improvement.
The ideal candidate brings strong business judgment, exceptional listening and communication skills, and significant hands-on software engineering experience. They will have experience building applications with agentic coding tools using a disciplined, repeatable development process supported by enterprise-grade CI/CD practices. They will also help maintain and evolve shared architectural frameworks so solutions remain consistent, reusable, secure, and supportable as the platform grows. Success in this role means delivering high-quality applications that users adopt, that solve meaningful business problems, and that produce measurable business outcomes.
Responsibilities:
Business Partnership and Solution Discovery:
- Partner directly with business stakeholders, spending a significant portion of time embedded with business teams to understand their work, listen carefully, uncover pain points, and identify high-value opportunities for custom applications and agentic solutions.
- Translate business needs into clear requirements, prioritized backlogs, and measurable success criteria. Distinguish essential features from optional enhancements and clearly communicate tradeoffs in scope, cost, risk, and delivery time.
- Evaluate business problems and determine the appropriate solution approach, including when to build a custom application, extend an existing platform, or use a simpler automation.
- Train and support users so they can confidently incorporate agentic tools and custom applications into their daily work. Gather feedback and measure adoption, time savings, and business outcomes to guide ongoing improvements.
Application Development and Agentic Solutions:
- Own the full software development lifecycle, from discovery and prototyping through design, development, testing, deployment, production support, and ongoing enhancement.
- Design and build applications on Hillwood’s Core Platform using Node.js, TypeScript, and SQL, including user interfaces, backend services, REST APIs, and event-driven integrations.
- Develop agentic applications using LLM APIs, agent frameworks, MCP servers, and tool integrations that connect with enterprise systems and data, including data from the Enterprise Data Lakehouse (EDL).
- Use AI coding tools such as Claude Code throughout the software development lifecycle, including discovery, requirements, design, development, testing, documentation, deployment, and support. Apply deliberate context management, task planning, code review, and testing practices to validate AI-generated work.
Architecture, Platform and Engineering Practices:
- Make architectural decisions that support scalable, reusable solutions and long-term business needs while aligning new applications with established enterprise standards.
- Maintain and evolve the Core Platform’s architectural frameworks, shared patterns, and reusable components, ensuring the platform continues to scale as it extends into new areas of the business.
- Apply strong engineering practices, including automated testing, peer code review, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and secure development on Microsoft Azure.
- Build, maintain, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines to support frequent, reliable, and repeatable releases.
- Build appropriate safeguards into agentic workflows, including access controls, human approvals, evaluations, logging, and failure handling.
Production Reliability and Continuous Improvement:
- Own the ongoing reliability and performance of delivered solutions. Investigate issues, identify root causes, and implement fixes and enhancements.
- Monitor application health and performance, AI solution quality, and operating costs, using findings to continuously improve reliability, efficiency, and user experience.
- Document application architecture, technical standards, and operational procedures to support long-term maintainability.
Technical Leadership and Collaboration:
- Partner across the Application Development, EDL, and AI teams to deliver integrated solutions and promote consistent engineering practices.
- Mentor other engineers and contribute reusable components, architectural patterns, and development practices that strengthen engineering capabilities across the organization.
- Share lessons learned from business engagements and delivered solutions to help improve the Core Platform and accelerate future application development.
Required Skills and Abilities:
- Exceptional business-facing communication, active listening, and relationship-building skills, with the ability to lead discovery conversations, ask thoughtful questions, demonstrate solutions, and explain technical concepts and decisions to nontechnical audiences.
- Strong business judgment and an ownership mindset, with the ability to identify high-value opportunities, prioritize competing needs, challenge assumptions constructively, and remain accountable for adoption and business outcomes after launch.
- Ability to translate ambiguous business needs and workflows into clear technical requirements, solution designs, prioritized development plans, and measurable success criteria.
- Strong full-stack software engineering skills, with the ability to design and develop secure, maintainable production applications across user interfaces, backend services, APIs, integrations, and data layers.
- Strong understanding of modern application architecture and design principles, including REST APIs, event-driven architectures, reliable messaging, error handling, scalability, and reusable application patterns.
- Proficiency with agentic application development concepts, including LLM APIs, agent frameworks, tool calling, orchestration, evaluation, and appropriate safeguards for enterprise use.
- Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code and the ability to apply disciplined practices for context management, task planning, code review, testing, and validation of AI-generated work.
- Working knowledge of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and enterprise tool integration patterns that connect LLMs with applications and data.
- Strong understanding of knowledge graph concepts, including entity and relationship modeling and the use of connected data to support application and AI use cases.
- Strong knowledge of Microsoft Azure application services and cloud development concepts, including application hosting, identity and access management, monitoring, and secrets management.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including Git, automated testing, peer code review, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and secure development practices.
- Ability to work independently through ambiguity, adapt quickly to unfamiliar technologies, troubleshoot across application and integration boundaries, and balance development priorities with ongoing operational support.
- Ability to make sound technical and architectural decisions while balancing immediate business needs with scalability, reusability, security, and long-term maintainability.
Education and Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Six or more years of professional software engineering experience, including independently leading the technical delivery of production business applications.
- Demonstrated experience building full-stack applications using modern development languages, frameworks, and technologies.
- Demonstrated experience partnering directly with business stakeholders and owning solutions from initial discovery and requirements definition through development, deployment, adoption, and ongoing operation.
- Experience building on, maintaining, or extending a shared application platform or architectural framework used across multiple applications or teams.
- Hands-on experience developing agentic applications using LLM APIs and agent frameworks, including tool calling, orchestration, and evaluation of agent behavior.
- Experience implementing Model Context Protocol (MCP) or comparable tool integrations that connect LLMs with enterprise applications and data.
- Experience working with knowledge graphs, including modeling entities and relationships and applying connected data to application or AI use cases.
- Hands-on experience deploying and operating applications in Microsoft Azure.
- Experience designing, maintaining, and improving CI/CD pipelines, such as GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps, for automated build, testing, and deployment.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in a forward-deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or technical consulting role.
- Experience integrating enterprise platforms such as ServiceNow, Box, DocuSign, or CRM systems, as well as middleware and integration technologies such as Boomi or Azure Logic Apps.
- Experience working with Databricks or another modern data lakehouse platform.
- Experience working within real estate, energy, investment management, or similarly complex business environments.
Benefit Highlights:
- Medical Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
- Health Savings Accounts (HSA)
- Vacation time
- Sick time
- Holidays
- Paid family caregiver leave
- Mental health and wellness resources
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
- 401(k) with company match
- Tuition assistance
- Additional programs to support Associates and their families
EEO Statement:
Hillwood is committed to providing Equal Opportunity in Employment, to all applicants and employees regardless of race, color, religion, gender, age, national origin, military status, veteran status, handicap, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or any other characteristic protected by law.