Staff 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, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, 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 Challengeand 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.

(This is a remote role that may require onsite interviews)

Cars Commerce builds solutions for automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers. Our driving force is to deliver one platform to simplify everything about buying and selling cars. The Websites Engineering Organization creates the foundational capabilities used across our Dealer Inspire platform, enabling speed, consistency, and innovation. 

Join us in shaping a future of automotive commerce. Our Dealer Inspire’s service delivery team is embarking on a transformation journey, building innovative services and redefining how we deliver value to our customers. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help revitalize our customer-facing tooling across our platform with a comprehensive technical strategy to simplify and amplify these user experiences and the capabilities they enable. This is an exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our platform and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact within the automotive industry.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years of 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.

Responsibilities

• Lead Full Stack Architecture: Define and drive reusable, reliable, and scalable architectures across the Dealer Inspire - Deliver Services experiences

• Contribution and Partnership:  Contribute to engineering and architecture initiatives and collaborate with principal engineers and engineering managers to execute and deliver initiative outcomes

• Author and Evolve Component Libraries: Lead design and development of shared components and design systems, with attention to accessibility, theming, maintainability, and developer ergonomics

• Champion Performance: Optimize performance across browsers and devices. Partner with design and product to improve interactivity and visual fidelity

• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with engineering, design, and product partners across teams to align on full-stack strategies and standards, elevate consistency, and reduce duplication

• Mentorship and Influence: Serve as a thought leader and mentor, coaching other engineers and shaping team/department-wide best practices. Build trust and rapport with eEngineers in the department to be viewed as subject matter expert

• Drive Documentation and DX: Treat components and libraries as products. Develop excellent documentation, innovative usage patterns, and internal developer experience

• Execution: Conduct thorough architecture and code reviews and coach engineers across the department on what good looks like through positive reinforcement and demonstration

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

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

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

• Solid experience in full-stack engineering, including a deep knowledge of PHP, JavaScript (and TypeScript), having working familiarity with, but no loyalty to, multiple frameworks (React  etc)

• 3+ 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

• Solid understanding of working with back-end technologies, architectural patterns, RESTful APIs, and authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth, JWT, etc.).

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation, providing prompt incident resolution, and conducting postmortems to improve system reliability

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up
• 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.