Principal Software Engineer

Cars Commerce•Chicago, IL

9d•$175,800 - $219,750•Remote

About The Position

Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce. We are undergoing a transformational and exciting shift to deliver a single platform that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars. We are unifying an ecosystem of automotive brands into a single, high-throughput, service-oriented platform. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be the technical north star for the Platform Core Services team. This team owns the high-concurrency engines—Identity, Inventory, and Leads—that power a multi-billion dollar marketplace. We’re looking for a technical architect and "lead-from-the-front" builder to drive this transformation. This is a role for an engineer who wants end-to-end sovereignty over both backend systems and the product surfaces that transform data into actionable insights—from complex RBAC systems to sophisticated self-service UIs. We are an AI-first organization. We leverage Claude Code to bypass the "boilerplate tax," allowing our engineers to spend the majority of their time on high-order systems design rather than routine implementation. This is a rare opportunity: the scale of an industry leader with the velocity and intellectual freedom of a high-growth startup.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience.
12+ years of software engineering excellence, including significant time at the Staff or Principal level
Deep expertise in designing high-concurrency distributed systems.
Comfortable navigating complex data-consistency models, event-driven architectures (Kafka/MSK), and optimizing for sub-second latency.
Architect extensible frontend platforms, including designing robust State Management strategies, implementing complex RBAC across the stack, and ensuring UI performance through efficient data-fetching patterns.
Expert in TypeScript/Node.js, but language-agnostic.
Belief that AI is the biggest shift in engineering since the Cloud.
Established workflow for leveraging LLMs to accelerate personal and team-wide output.
Proven ability to drive consensus in complex environments by using data—not just opinion—to influence stakeholders and align engineering roadmaps with C-suite objectives.
Track record of evaluating emerging technologies (e.g., NewSQL, Edge Computing, or Agentic AI) and running proof-of-concepts that modernize the tech stack without disrupting production stability.

Nice To Haves

Experience within a large-scale, "Big Tech," or high-growth environment or FAANG, Uber, Stripe etc

Responsibilities

Define the evolution of our services to support sub-second latency and massive concurrency.
Bridge the gap between heavy-lift backend systems and modern, intuitive UI products.
Redefine the SDLC by integrating LLM-based orchestration into the development workflow, significantly increasing the organization’s velocity.
Lead the RFC process by driving consensus across engineering and product boundaries.
Own the "Four Nines" (99.99%) for services handling tens of thousands of requests per second.
Treat observability and developer experience as first-class products.
Act as a sponsor for Staff and Senior engineers.
Raise the technical "ceiling" of the entire engineering organization.