Lead Sr. Software Engineer - Platform 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.

[100% remote role. May require onsite interviews]

About The Role

Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce with our marketplace platform - Cars.com. Our Marketplace Platform’s Operations Team is on a mission to accelerate innovation by building and maintaining the infrastructure, tooling, and systems that enable our development teams to deliver scalable, resilient, highly available software efficiently and securely, with full observability and automated feedback loops.

Our Platform Operations team is the foundation that powers our entire engineering organization. We own the critical infrastructure services that enable CI/CD pipelines, observability, and developer tooling—the digital foundation that empowers every engineering team across the Cars Commerce Marketplace. This work enables our product teams with innovative technical solutions and self-service capabilities to build, deploy, and operate their services with confidence.

This is an incredible opportunity to make a direct impact. You'll collaborate closely with Engineering Leadership to translate bold infrastructure goals into reliable, scalable platforms. You will drive best-in-class engineering practices around scalability, observability, security, and reliability in your daily work. As you grow in the role, you'll have the chance to deepen your technical expertise, own larger platform initiatives, and contribute significantly to our architectural direction.

Join us and build the core marketplace platform capabilities that are redefining how engineering teams build, deploy, and operate at scale!

About You

As a Lead Senior Software Engineer, You’re a results-driven engineering leader (Independent Contributor) with deep expertise in building scalable, reliable platform infrastructure. You excel at designing CI/CD systems from the ground up, architecting and troubleshooting cloud environments, optimizing systems for performance and maintainability, and creating robust developer tooling for fast-growing teams.

Our Lead Senior Software Engineer has a strong grasp of platform engineering best practices, you make strategic technical decisions that balance immediate delivery with long-term stability. Equally comfortable coding or guiding teams, values testing, observability, and strong pipelines as the backbone of dependable systems.

Above all, our Lead Senior Software Engineer, is a systems thinker passionate about developing core platform capabilities that help engineers innovate quickly and confidently.

Why You'll Be Excited About This Role

This opportunity enables you to...

• Design and Build Strategic Platform Infrastructure: Lead the design and development of systems that speed delivery and enhance the engineer experience, making strategic architectural decisions that meet SLOs and scale with long-term growth
• Define Technical Strategy: Analyze the current state, anticipate future challenges, and shape the platform engineering roadmap, ensuring scalable, sustainable architecture that aligns with the company’s vision
• Build Developer Tooling: Build internal platforms that boost developer productivity, reduce friction, and enable self-service for web and mobile teams, directly elevating engineering velocity and satisfaction across the organization
• Implement Platform Best Practices: Champion and implement CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, and security practices to ensure production systems remain reliable, visible, and secure throughout the development lifecycle.
• Drive Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Partner with Cloud and Product Engineering teams to create clear, comprehensive documentation for platform designs, architectures, and operations, enabling teams to easily build on and integrate with platform services in a self-service way.
• Champion Operational Excellence: Drive standardization and evangelize best practices for production support, incident response, and leveraging metrics/data to evaluate operational health.

We're Excited About You Because…

• You have 8+ years of software engineering experience with exposure to platform engineering, designing and implementing technology platforms optimized for resilient, scalable, and highly available applications built with languages that leverage VMs for execution (Elixir/Erlang, Java, Ruby, etc..).
• You have proven experience building CI/CD systems for web and mobile applications using modern technologies
• You are an expert with AWS services and containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, including deploying, monitoring, and scaling applications in production
• You have deep expertise with Linux operating systems, and experience debugging and optimizing vms used for programming language execution.
• If you are not yet an expert with the Erlang Open Telecom Platform (OTP) and BEAM virtual machine used by the Erlang and Elixir programming language, you are excited to become one.
• You have strong programming skills in one or more languages, with a demonstrated ability to write maintainable, extensible code and experience setting team style guides and architectural best practices.
• You have extensive experience building platforms and tools that enable developer efficiency, security, compliance, and observability across web and mobile applications
• You have experience with DevSecOps practices, release planning, defining operational metrics/alerts/runbooks/best practices, building debugging tooling, and leading incident responses within an on-call rotation
• You have excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, and experience mentoring individuals both formally and informally

Bonus...

• Experience building platform engineering systems that support mobile app development (iOS/Android) alongside web application development is highly valued, but not required.
• Familiarity with managed queue systems such as SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ
• Strong background building and maintaining distributed systems, services, and APIs

In the spirit of pay transparency, we are excited to share the base salary range for this position. In addition to base salary, some roles are eligible for our bonus and/or equity programs, depending on level and role. Regular full-time positions are eligible for our comprehensive benefits package. If you are hired at Cars Commerce, your final base salary compensation will be determined based on factors such as skills and/or experience. If the salary range is close to what you're seeking, then we encourage you to apply and learn more about the total compensation package for this position.

Salary Range

$135,300.00-169,150.00

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!

For US-based Positions: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. Please note that we are unable to sponsor employment visas at this time.

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.