Who We Are:
Core Spaces (Core) is more than a real estate company; it’s a people company. Where building relationships is just as important as building properties. From researchers and architects to designers and operators, Core is made up of risk takers and dreamers who are on a mission to invent the future of living. Our six cultural values guide us every day and we strive to live them in everything we do: PUSH (Invent Better Places to Live), GRIT (We Got This), LIFT (Help Each Other Win), SHINE (Bring Your Full Self), UPHOLD (Never Break Trust), GROW (Always Get Better). Everything Core does stem from this culture of collaboration and innovation, and the drive to constantly improve the resident experience. This unique approach has led to creating spaces and services that are redefining the way people live.
What We Do:
Founded in 2010, Core is a vertically integrated real estate investment manager focused on acquiring, developing and managing across the student housing and build-to-rent (“BTR”) sectors. Its residential communities feature world-class amenities, progressive design, and hospitality-driven service. Core’s student housing portfolio includes over 74,440 beds currently owned or managed, with a pipeline of over 53,860 beds in various stages of development. Core’s BTR division has over 3,000 homes under development, now leasing or in its pipeline in high-growth metros nationwide. For more information, visit www.corespaces.com.
*Portfolio and pipeline numbers as of Q2 2026
Benefits That Matter:
- A culture that provides you with a sense of belonging
- Competitive pay that values your contributions
- Incentives designed to reward your achievements
- Paid flexible PTO to disconnect or celebrate life milestones
- Paid 14+ holidays, including your birthday, to disconnect and celebrate
- Paid Parental Leave that begins after 90 days
- Paid volunteer time off to give back to your community
- Monthly workshop weeks; fewer meetings & more collaboration
- Robust health plan options that begin within at least 30 days of your employment
- Monthly phone reimbursement
- Wellness allowance and perks, including a yearly subscription to a meditation app
- An environment that provides you a voice to share your perspectives
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for access to confidential support services
- Company retirement options including 401(k) + matching & Roth account option
Position Overview:
Core Spaces is seeking a Senior Director of Product Engineering to lead our Software Engineering and Digital Products function. Reporting directly to the SVP of Technology, this senior leadership role will own the strategy, delivery, and cross-functional coordination of Core Spaces’ custom software and digital product portfolio. This person will serve as the primary bridge between technical teams and business stakeholders, helping translate organizational needs into scalable digital solutions that support the highest-impact outcomes for the business.
This leader will be accountable for creating clarity around digital product priorities, engineering delivery health, team capacity, and cross-functional dependencies, ensuring technology resources are focused on the highest-impact initiatives for the business.
What You Will Do:
- Own the digital solutions roadmap, aligning development priorities with organizational goals and cross-functional needs.
- Partner with Technology leadership to define success measures for digital product delivery, including improved prioritization discipline, stronger execution visibility, reduced delivery risk, and better alignment of engineering capacity to business impact.
- Ensure digital product and engineering decisions support operational efficiency, resident experience, data visibility, and scalable business processes across Core Spaces.
- Establish and maintain a clear intake, prioritization, and roadmap governance process for digital product and software engineering requests.
- Organize and communicate a structured prioritization framework to the SVP of Technology ahead of quarterly technology planning cycles.
- Translate business needs into actionable product and engineering priorities, helping stakeholders understand tradeoffs, sequencing, capacity constraints, and delivery implications.
- Synthesize inputs from across the Software, Data, and AI workgroups to identify overlapping needs, consolidate efforts, and surface organizational-level opportunities.
- Serve as the primary coordination point across Software, Data Architecture, and AI Architecture teams to ensure shared dependencies, integration points, and sequencing are aligned.
- Lead, coach, and develop Program Managers and Principal Engineers, setting clear expectations, reinforcing accountability, and ensuring team goals are aligned to Technology and business priorities.
- Manage and balance competing workstreams to protect team bandwidth and focus development capacity on the highest-impact work.
- Create visibility into delivery performance, including sprint health, resource capacity, blockers, dependencies, and risks requiring escalation.
- Monitor project delivery health across active development initiatives, ensuring Azure DevOps boards are accurate, current, and actionable.
- Ensure the team delivers against commitments by proactively escalating blockers, dependencies, and delivery risks.
- Maintain active oversight of weekly sprint ceremonies, including standups, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives.
- Evaluate software architecture decisions, technical proposals, and build-versus-buy recommendations with the technical depth needed to identify risks, tradeoffs, and opportunities.
- Provide oversight of cloud-based development practices, CI/CD pipelines, and Azure DevOps workflows to ensure they are healthy, consistent, scalable, and aligned with modern software delivery principles.
- Occasional travel may be necessary as needed.
- Perform all other duties and tasks as assigned by management.
- Must be able to complete all physical requirements of this role with or without a reasonable accommodation.
Ideally, You'll Have:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent combination of education and professional experience.
- 8+ years of progressive technology experience, including hands-on software development and at least 3 years writing and shipping production code before moving into leadership.
- 3+ years of people leadership experience managing technical teams, including coaching, performance management, goal setting, and developing software engineering and program/project management talent.
- Hands-on experience building modern web applications, including frameworks and runtimes such as Node.js, Express, and React.
- Understanding of API design and frameworks, including RESTful services, integration patterns, and inter-service communication.
- Ability to read code, review pull requests and evaluate technical implementations directly rather than relying solely on team summaries.
- Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure services, cloud deployment architecture, CI/CD pipelines, Azure DevOps environments, and cloud-based software delivery practices.
- Strong understanding of Software Development Lifecycle principles and Agile delivery methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban.
- Experience managing developers and program/project managers through ambiguity, competing priorities, and cross-functional stakeholder demands.
- Experience building or improving product intake, roadmap planning, prioritization, and portfolio governance processes.
- Ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams, align team capacity around highest-impact initiatives, and communicate delivery health, risks, and progress to senior leaders.
- Strong pattern recognition and systems thinking, with the ability to synthesize complex cross-functional inputs into clear, structured recommendations.
- Proven ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and communicate business context back to technical teams.
- Practical understanding of how software, data, and AI-enabled solutions work together to support business operations and decision-making.
- Ability to influence without direct authority by building alignment across peer teams through credibility and collaboration.
You'll crush it if you have experience with
- Master’s degree or MBA.
- Experience in the multi-family, real estate, or PropTech industries.
- Familiarity with Databricks or similar unified data and analytics platforms.
- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates.
- Working knowledge of data platform concepts and/or AI/ML solution delivery.
- Familiarity with enterprise Microsoft ecosystem tools, including Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint.
Organizational Structure
Reports to: Senior Vice President of Technology
Direct Reports: Program Managers and Principal Engineers
Disclaimer:
Please note that job responsibilities, reporting lines, and duties outlined in this job description are subject to change to meet the evolving needs of the organization.
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, Core Spaces celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an equitable and inclusive environment, which creates a sense of belonging for all employees. We do not discriminate and believe every individual should be proud of who they are and the community they represent.
Pay Range:
USD $190,000.00 - USD $220,000.00 /Yr.
Additional Compensation:
Employees may be eligible for discretionary bonuses, typically 20% of base salary annually, depending on individual and organizational performance.
Compensation Disclosure:
The compensation range listed reflects the base salary or hourly rate that we reasonably and in good faith expect to offer for this role at the time of posting. Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as education, experience, skills, certifications, seniority, geographic location, and business needs.
This role may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, including bonuses, commissions, stipends, or non-cash incentives, depending on position and performance. Benefits may include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and other role-based offerings, subject to eligibility requirements.
All compensation components are subject to change based on business needs or market conditions.
