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.

About Cars Commerce

Cars Commerce delivers innovative solutions that transform how automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers buy and sell vehicles. From our industry-leading marketplace, Cars.com, to cutting-edge products like Dealer Inspire and AccuTrade, we provide a unified platform that simplifies the entire automotive commerce experience.

About the Role [100% remote. May require onsite interviews]

An exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our platforms and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact on the industry. Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce as we continue to build a new Inventory Platform.

This Staff Software Engineer role is with our Platform Engineering’s Inventory team. It is foundational to everything that happens on Cars.com and beyond. Every vehicle listing, every search result, every marketplace experience begins with the inventory data we steward. The systems we build — and the way we build them — power the engine of our company. The team provides enterprise-level services that enable consistent, reliable, and scalable handling of vehicle inventory data across Cars Commerce platforms. Our goal is to ensure that inventory data — from diverse sources and formats — is accurately processed, enriched, and delivered to downstream systems in real-time, in a way that maximizes business value.

About You

You are a seasoned, results-oriented software engineering hands-on leader with a passion for building scalable, reliable backend systems. You have a strong track record of designing and developing API-based services that perform under high traffic, with a focus on performance, security, and long-term maintainability.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you bring deep expertise in software architecture and engineering best practices, and you're comfortable making thoughtful technical decisions that balance speed, quality, and stability. You're hands-on when needed, and equally confident providing technical direction and mentoring others as they build backend services that adapt to evolving product needs.

You understand the critical role of testing, observability, and CI/CD pipelines in delivering dependable systems. You think in systems — recognizing patterns across use cases and designing solutions that can be reused and extended across teams and platforms.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of our inventory platform and enable product teams to move faster, with confidence. As a Staff Software Engineer, You'll work collaboratively to drive technical designs, solve complex technical challenges, and help establish engineering best practices — all while empowering a large team of talented engineers to execute across a wide range of technical domains.

This opportunity enables you to…

Own the technology strategy for the Cars Commerce Inventory Platform, driving its technical evolution to enable scale, performance, and long-term agility
Lead the design, work breakdown, and development of high-performance, API-based backend services that meet service-level objectives (SLOs) and scale with growing business demands
Take ownership of business-critical production systems, including participating in on-call rotations, resolving incidents, and conducting postmortems to continuously improve reliability
Champion technical excellence by promoting best practices in system design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across the team
Partner closely with engineering and product leaders to align technical solutions with business objectives, guide complex decisions, and balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability
Foster a culture of collaboration and ownership by building strong cross-team relationships, encouraging open communication, and influencing through empathy and technical credibility
Mentor and grow engineers by developing their technical depth, system design skills, and leadership capabilities

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
10+ years of experience in backend software development with a strong focus on designing, building, and operating large-scale and highly available systems, including microservices architectures, APIs, and event-driven systems
3+ years of experience architecting and building cloud-native solutions on AWS, leveraging services such as EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, and Lambda
Experience with Elixir and Phoenix framework is preferred. Candidates without Elixir experience but with a strong background in distributed systems, services, APIs, and backend development who are willing to learn new technologies are encouraged to apply.
Strong system design skills with the ability to evaluate trade-offs, drive consensus, and document design decisions effectively
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
Proven experience mentoring engineers and supporting their growth in technical depth, architecture, and leadership
Expertise with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), including deploying, monitoring, and scaling applications in production environments
Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and gRPC, with the ability to select the most appropriate interface for given technical and business requirements
In-depth knowledge of relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB) data stores, caching strategies (e.g., Redis), and messaging systems (e.g., Kafka), with demonstrated experience implementing these at scale
Proven experience building observability into systems using tools like DataDog or OpenTelemetry to ensure performance, reliability, and uptime
Understanding of modern application security principles, including secure API design, data encryption, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), and role-based access control
Familiarity with DevSecOps practices, including CI/CD pipeline implementation, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and security integration throughout the software development lifecycle
Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation, providing prompt incident resolution and conducting postmortems to improve system reliability

Salary Range

$154,200.00-192,750.00

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!

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.