Senior Principal Software Development Engineer, Consumer Engineering
About The Position
CarGurus is hiring for a software engineer in our Consumer Commerce department – the group responsible for our highest trafficked pages and products. Our mission is to deliver comprehensive, accurate, and engaging vehicle information, fostering trust and driving informed and high-intent consumer decisions, while upholding CarGurus’ standards for innovation, user-centricity, and technical excellence. In this role, you’ll contribute to high‑visibility parts of our site, introduce AI to our consumer experiences, and collaborate closely with partners in Product, UX, and Analytics. This is a fast-moving, impact-oriented environment where you will set technical direction across the department, mentor engineers, and drive high-visibility AI initiatives from concept to production at scale.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience architecting resilient, scalable systems and leading technical direction across multiple teams with extensive experience designing, implementing, and deploying consumer-facing AI experiences in production
- Hands-on experience with LangChain, LangGraph, and LangFuse in Python and with the platform and infrastructure layers of AI systems, including storage, memory, load management, evaluations, and observability
- Broad knowledge of the AI framework and tooling landscape beyond Python, with the ability to evaluate and recommend approaches independent of language or ecosystem
- Hands-on full stack experience building well-structured, performant applications across frontend, backend, and the platform and infrastructure layers for production-grade systems, including experience building APIs and REST services in Java and UX applications in React preferred
- Strong communicator with a collaborative spirit who can influence technical direction across multiple teams and disciplines
- Experience working within the AWS ecosystem a plus
- Experience with agentic programming and multi-agent workflows, including guiding teams through adoption of these approaches
- Experience defining engineering patterns and standards that others adopt, and mentoring engineers on architecture and coding practices
Nice To Haves
- Experience building APIs and REST services in Java
- UX applications in React
- Experience working within the AWS ecosystem
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and deploy consumer-facing experiences end-to-end to 45 million monthly visitors, from the data and model layer through to the user-facing product, being hands-on and actively participating in the implementation of select initiatives
- Serve as a go-to AI expert and advisor for all Consumer AI projects, providing technical guidance on architecture, design, and implementation choices
- Guide the platform and infrastructure decisions underpinning AI deployments, including storage, memory, request handling and load, evaluation pipelines, observability and analytics
- Evaluate the broader AI framework and tooling landscape, independent of any single language or ecosystem, and guide teams toward the right approach for a given problem; develop proof-of-concepts to validate AI approaches and clearly explain the trade-offs between different technologies
- Build and operate systems using LangChain, LangGraph, and Langfuse in Python to develop, orchestrate, and evaluate agentic and LLM-based applications in production
- Drive the department's adoption of fully agentic programming, defining the patterns, tooling, and best practices engineers follow when building agentic systems
- Partner with engineering leadership, product, and data teams to shape phased platform guidelines and roadmaps for consumer initiatives
- Mentor engineers across teams on system design, evaluation methodology, and operational best practices
- Conduct workshops and produce documentation on AI development, deployment, monitoring, and support practices across multiple teams
- Document architectural decisions in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and share findings and best practices across teams
Benefits
- Equity for all employees, both when they start and as they continue to grow with us
- Career development programs
- Corporate giving programs
- Employee resource groups (ERGs) and communities
- Flexible hybrid model
- Robust time off policies
- Daily free lunch
- New car discount
- Meditation and fitness apps
- Commuting cost coverage
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
