Principal Software Engineer

Be essential at Cars Commerce

At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.  

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challenge and Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.

Your role:

If you’re an experienced engineer looking for a Principal role with a 100% remote team, you’ve come to the right place!

Cars Commerce helps tens of millions of people like you and me find their perfect car match each year. We’re looking for a Principal experience engineer with 15+ years of aggregate software engineering experience to architect and evangelize how we build and scale our Dealer Inspire product. Dealer Inspire provides innovative digital marketing and dealership management solutions for the automotive industry. It offers a range of solutions designed to help car dealerships optimize their online presence, increase sales, and improve customer experiences. 

This role has a high degree of agency, autonomy, and ambiguity. You’ll work with our core product, feature and platform teams to determine technical needs and constraints to guide our engineering strategies and practices. You’ll be a leader and a mentor – enabling teams around you to deliver effectively and efficiently. Outside of engineering, you’ll be working with cross-functional teams such as product, marketing, analytics, and data to understand our short-term and long-term business objectives. You’ll reconcile competing demands, constraints, and requirements across stakeholders in order to devise technical solutions that move us forward effectively and efficiently. Once you’ve worked with the teams to arrive at a technical solution, you’ll work to socialize and implement this solution, taking particular care to ensure we have tight feedback loops so we can practice continuous improvement and ensuring the entire organization is ascribing to the best practices you put forth.

In short, you’ll be a leader and a force multiplier. Not only will you bridge systems technically, you’ll be bridging the gap between organizations to ensure that we can all arrive at the best solution we can given the information we have available. You’ll educate and guide across all levels of the organization, and your impact will be felt across the entire enterprise. You’ll be a critical part of how a billion-dollar publicly-traded company runs its technical strategy, and your decisions will impact millions of users.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Technical

  • Drive, own and create of software architecture patterns and best practices that can be used across the enterprise

  • Work with Principal Engineers and Engineering Management to own and drive a roadmap for Engineering and Architecture initiatives

  • Actively coach department teams to consider maintainability and extensibility in their approach to technical design

  • Ensures department teams implement the tooling and techniques required to ship code consistently, securely, and quickly

• Execution

  • Support the delivery of both product and highly technical projects from start to finish across multiple quarters with milestones and clear success criteria, ensuring alignment with business and technical goals

  • Conduct thorough Architecture and Code Reviews and coach Engineers across the department on what good looks like through positive reinforcement and demonstration.

  • Ensure teams across the enterprise are adhering to defined architecture and software development patterns and best practices.

  • Understand ambiguous business problems related to your work as well as the work of your department; resolve them

• Collaboration & Communication

  • Produce excellent written products in technical designs, assessments, code reviews/PRs, technical strategy, project status and more

  • Build trust and rapport with Engineering and Product Management across the company to be viewed as subject matter expert

  • Distil highly-technical and/or abstract information for consumption by non-technical stakeholders and executives

  • Actively delivers situational & task-based feedback as well as feedback on overall performance to other teammates, their direct manager, senior management & individual contributors on outside teams, and cross functional stakeholders

• Leadership

  • Considers factors outside their immediate team's purview in how to automate, de-risk, and optimize their department’s delivery

  • The ability to create training programs to onboard engineers onto new technologies, systems, and architectures, and up-level those already privy

  • Ensures knowledge and lessons learned obtained by themselves as well as other teammates are shared across their department team as well as their department's cross functional stakeholders

  • Seeks out opportunities to mentor other individuals, both formally and informally, across their department, creates and manages projects in support of mentorship activities, sets department best practices around how to effectively mentor individuals

Required Skill and Experience

• Deep expertise in modern tech stacks and best practices, you are advanced in multiple areas of building a scalable digital product from user experience to compute to data persistence to analytical concerns across those areas

• You have designed and implemented applications with reasonable scale (1M+ monthly visits) and/or revenue ($1+ MRR).

• You understand the complexities of working with modern technologies, and enjoy working through them to share lessons learned with fellow engineers

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, focused on frontend, backend and DevOps engineering 

• 10+ years of experience architecting and building cloud applications for high-traffic, large-scale web applications

• Experience in building resilient and scalable software solutions with a deep understanding of performance optimization techniques across the stack.

• High proficiency with the AWS ecosystem

• Experience in CI/CD practices with an emphasis on delivering quality software

• Experience being a technical leader in a 100% remote environment, influencing stakeholders across design, engineering, and technology, both within your own organization and across an enterprise

#LI-KO1 #LI-Remote

Salary Range

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
• 401(k) with Company Match + Immediate Vesting
• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Generous PTO
• Refuel - a service based recognition program where employees receive additional paid time away to learn grow and reset
• Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. California Applicants: Click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Applicants. For current employees, please click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Employees.