Lead Sr. 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.

About Us:

At Cars.com, we’re passionate about helping shoppers meet their perfect car match, and job seekers their perfect career match. Our culture of openness, growth, innovation, and diversity starts with people. Every day we’re hyper-focused on helping people find their perfect match, build relationships, and deliver results. We welcome hard conversations and collaborate with each other to find solutions while focusing on the outcome at hand. Cars.com has revolutionized the automotive industry for both shoppers and sellers alike through technology, and we’d love to have you join us to boldly ride into the future.

Cars.com is a CARS brand, which also includes Dealer Inspire, DealerRater, FUEL, CreditIQ and Accu-Trade. Learn more here.

Your Role:

We're seeking a highly skilled and motivated Lead Senior Software Engineer to help us redefine our search capabilities within our listings marketplace. In this pivotal role, you'll be a lead engineer for your team's day-to-day software engineering operations, taking ownership of engineering-driven and product-driven projects from idea to completion with minimal oversight. You'll be instrumental in designing, developing, and scaling our next-generation search platform. This is an exciting opportunity to tackle significant technical challenges, drive architectural decisions for your team, and actively mentor other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.

What You'll Do:

• Lead the technical vision and execution for our consumer-facing search capabilities, serving as a primary engineering lead for your team.

• Design, develop, and maintain robust and scalable search infrastructure using frameworks like OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, or Solr, ensuring high performance and reliability.

• Write high-performance and reliable backend services using languages such as Elixir, NodeJS, or Python, and actively drive the definition of team style guides and best practices.

• Develop and implement GraphQL APIs to efficiently serve content to front-end applications, considering non-happy-path scenarios, negative testing, and threat modeling to enhance system maturity at the team level.

• Contribute to the architecture and implementation of server-driven UI strategies, ensuring flexible and dynamic search interfaces.

• Explore and integrate agentic AI technologies to enhance search relevance, personalization, and intelligent recommendations, while actively seeking data-driven opportunities to improve test automation coverage and efficacy across your team's area of responsibility.

• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define and deliver impactful search features

• Ensure the performance, reliability, and security of the search platform, proactively defending against edge cases and error states to de-risk our systems and operations.

• Contribute to code reviews, technical documentation, and knowledge sharing within the team, and serve as a peer reviewer for whitepapers and technical documents across your team.

• Mentor and guide junior engineers, formally and informally, setting team best practices around effective mentorship and actively participating in crafting interview materials for your team.

• Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancements in search technologies, backend development, and AI.

• Act as a key stakeholder in release planning for your team's projects, ensuring detailed release plans and checklists are prepared, and automating, de-risking, and optimizing team release processes.

• Help set department-wide best practices around operational metrics, alerting, and runbooks, and proactively identify potential blockers, knowing when to escalate or conduct timeboxed investigations.

• Lead team ceremonies, managing discussions, ensuring follow-up items are noted, and actively suggesting improvements to processes, cadence, or scheduling.

• Set team-wide standards around the on-call process and coach teams on how to improve using a pragmatic, data-driven approach.

• Actively build and maintain working relationships across the enterprise, both within engineering and with cross-functional partners, proactively driving alignment through discussions.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with a significant focus on backend systems.

• Proven experience as a lead engineer responsible for a team's day-to-day software engineering operations and end-to-end ownership of complex projects.

• Deep expertise in designing, implementing, and scaling search solutions, preferably with OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch), with an understanding of automated testing across departmental scope.

• A willingness to learn Elixir quickly.

• Experience designing and implementing APIs, ideally in GraphQL.

• Familiarity with server-driven UI concepts and implementation approaches.

• A strong interest in and understanding of agentic AI and its potential applications in search.

• Experience with AWS cloud platforms.

• Solid understanding of software engineering best practices, including setting team best practices for testing, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.

• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills, with the ability to proactively seek out answers to ambiguity and proactively drive alignment across various stakeholders.

• A proactive and ownership-oriented mindset, demonstrating the ability to identify dependencies for medium to long-term projects and accurately estimate timelines for team-owned projects.

• Demonstrated ability to set risk management best practices for your team and to provide effective feedback to teammates, managers, and cross-functional partners.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience with Elixir as a programming language

• Experience with machine learning and natural language processing techniques relevant to search.

• Contributions to open-source projects.

• Experience with performance tuning and optimization of large-scale distributed systems.

• Familiarity with front-end technologies (e.g., React, Redux, Android, iOS, etc).

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.