Manager, Software Engineering

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.

Job Description

About the Role

Cars Commerce is unifying the car-buying journey on a single, data-driven platform, and Transactional Platform supplies systems like payments, credit applications, incentives management, and other capabilities that enable transactional functionality across every brand in our portfolio. As a Engineering Manager, you’ll guide autonomous teams that own several high-throughput, API-first services built in PHP / Node.js and deployed on AWS EKS / ECS. You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Product leadership to turn six- to twelve-month business goals into an incremental, measurable roadmap; champion sound engineering practices around observability, security and on-call health; and serve as incident commander and steward of production reliability for your domain. Beyond your immediate teams, you’ll influence platform architecture, shape cross-domain integrations that unlock new revenue streams, and help set the technical direction for the wider organization.

About You

You’re an empathetic, outcomes-oriented leader who balances people, process and product. Perhaps you’ve shipped or overseen services handling thousands of requests per second, mentored senior engineers and first-time managers, or negotiated scope changes without losing sight of customer value—but you still see yourself as a lifelong learner who uses data rather than dogma to improve. You foster psychological safety, celebrate diverse viewpoints and believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Even if your technology experience doesn't perfectly match our stack or automotive retail isn’t already on your résumé, your curiosity, bias for action and commitment to inclusive leadership matter more than a perfect skills match—so if the mission excites you, we encourage you to apply. 

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-team delivery: Lead a cross-functional team of 6-10 engineers that owns a high-throughput, API-first service; keep at least three upcoming sprints groomed in Jira, set clear sprint goals, and model disciplined velocity tracking and burndown hygiene.

• Quarterly planning & prioritization: Partner with your Product Manager to translate OKRs into three-sprint increments, balancing new features, technical debt, and reliability investments while communicating trade-offs to stakeholders.

• Customer focus: Collaborate with engineering teams across Cars Commerce products (New Cars, Used Cars, Car Dealers, Prices & Reviews | Cars.com , Dealer Inspire, AccuTrade, etc.) to develop strong partnerships, thus enabling the success of major initiatives by building new capabilities into our API services.

• People development: Run regular 1-1s, craft individual growth plans, deliver timely feedback, and mentor engineers toward senior-level ownership, fostering an inclusive, psychologically safe culture.

• Reliability & security stewardship: Own SLOs, on-call rotations, incident command, and post-mortem learning; ensure vulnerability-remediation SLAs and secure-by-design practices are embedded in the backlog.

• Metrics-driven improvement: Use DORA, developer productivity, and Jira data to surface bottlenecks, lead retrospectives, and run continuous-improvement experiments that raise throughput without sacrificing quality.

• Cross-team collaboration: Coordinate APIs and dependencies with adjacent teams, participate in architecture reviews, and represent your service’s roadmap and risks in program reviews.

• Hiring & onboarding: Work with Talent Acquisition to source a diverse pipeline, conduct structured interviews, and onboard new engineers into our observability-first, blameless culture.

Qualifications

• Experience: 7+ years in software engineering, including 2–3 years in an Engineering Manager role; proven success shipping and operating production services that handle hundreds to low-thousands of requests per second.

• Technical depth: Strong background in cloud-native architectures (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, ECS), event-driven and API-driven systems; comfortable reviewing designs for scalability, resilience, and cost.

• Delivery mastery: Comfortable running two-week sprints, maintaining healthy backlogs, and leveraging Jira, DORA, and developer productivity metrics to forecast capacity and improve team performance.

• Reliability & security mindset: Hands-on experience defining SLOs, leading incident response, and integrating CI/CD and vulnerability remediation into everyday development.

• People leadership: Demonstrated ability to coach engineers at all levels, resolve conflict, and build inclusive, high-trust and high-performance team cultures aligned with Cars Commerce values.

• Product partnership: Skilled at translating technical decisions into business impact and collaborating with Product and Design to reach outcome-focused decisions.

• Communication excellence: Clear, concise communicator who adapts message and medium for engineers, cross-functional peers, and executives alike.

• Bonus points: Experience with PHP/Laravel or Node.js, automotive-retail data pipelines, or leading platform modernization initiatives.

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.