Lead Software Engineer (Frontend)

Cars Commerce • Chicago, IL

1d • Remote

About The Position

Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce. Cars Commerce builds solutions for automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers. Our driving force is to deliver a single platform that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars. At Cars Commerce, we’re passionate about helping shoppers meet their perfect car 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. Our Marketplace Engineering Team drives our cars.com platform. We are on a transformational journey, building innovative and integrated services that redefine how we deliver value to our customers and consumers.. As a Lead Software Engineer on our Marketplace Engineering Team, 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 shape the future of our platform and drive meaningful change at scale, making a lasting impact within the automotive industry.

Requirements

• Significant professional software engineering experience (8+ years)
• Extensive experience in front end and backend software engineering experience, including a deep knowledge of JavaScript (and TypeScript), Web Components, and having working familiarity with various web frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, etc).
• Expert-level understanding of browser fundamentals: HTML, CSS (Flexbox, Grid), DOM, event lifecycle, rendering, and performance tuning.
• Strong experience using browser dev tools across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. for layout debugging, JS tracing, and performance profiling.
• Solid understanding of working with back-end technologies and architectural patterns.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, influence others, and align multiple teams around technical direction.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and maintaining component-based design systems with support for theming, responsive behavior, and accessibility.
• Passion for user experience, developer ergonomics, and performance measurement (including Core Web Vitals).
• Able to observe, instrument, optimize, and operate what you build (we use Datadog)
• Understanding of CI/CD and deployment toolchains; we use CircleCI, Docker, Amazon EKS, Terraform
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Nice To Haves

• Experience building production applications using a Server Driven UI (SDUI) approach to build across web and mobile clients using GraphQL.
• Some production Elixir experience or knowledge; you've built and deployed Elixir to production

Responsibilities

• Drive technical excellence by championing best practices in software design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across teams
• Have a high degree of agency, autonomy, and ambiguity: You’ll work with our platform and feature teams as well as our iOS and Android mobile engineering team to determine technical needs and constraints.
• Act as a trusted partner and advisor to the Marketplace teams —aligning technical solutions with business goals, guiding complex decisions, and balancing near-term delivery with long-term scalability
• Be a leader and a mentor – enabling teams around you to deliver effectively and efficiently.
• Lead team ceremonies, managing discussions, ensuring follow-up items are noted, and actively suggesting improvements to processes, cadence, or scheduling.
• 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 team-wide best practices around operational metrics, alerting, and runbooks, and proactively identify potential blockers, knowing when to escalate or conduct timeboxed investigations.
• 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.
• Lead and be a force multiplier. Not only will you bridge systems technically, you’ll be bridging the gap between organizations to ensure that we can all arrive at the best solution we can given the information we have available.
• 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 product experience, personalization, and intelligent recommendations across your team's area of responsibility.

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed