Senior Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Architecture
About The Position
CarGurus is hiring a Senior Principal Software Engineer to serve as a hands-on cloud architect in its Engineering Platform organization. Following a large lift-and-shift to AWS, this role will help more than 300 engineers build cloud-native, SaaS-ready software that is resilient, secure, and scalable. The engineer will work alongside teams across the organization, tackling difficult system and cloud architecture problems, helping teams adopt practical solutions, and leaving behind reusable patterns. The role spans system and cloud architecture, AWS platform practices, cost efficiency, SaaS maturity, compliance readiness, and agentic workloads. The engineer will partner with Product Engineering, Cloud Enablement, AWS solutions architects, InfoSec, and the Technical Leadership Team. They will prototype and build reference implementations, communicate architectural trade-offs, document decisions, and mentor senior engineers. The position offers a flexible hybrid work model. The annual pay range is $191,000–$239,000. The compensation package may also include discretionary bonuses or incentives and Restricted Stock Units. CarGurus describes its benefits and perks as including equity for all employees, career development and corporate giving programs, employee resource groups and communities, robust time off policies, daily free lunch, a new car discount, meditation and fitness apps, and commuting cost coverage.
Requirements
- 10 or more years of software engineering experience, including 5 or more years designing and running production systems on AWS.
- Production-quality coding ability in at least one of Java, Python, TypeScript, or Go.
- Fluency with Terraform infrastructure as code.
- Deep AWS expertise across networking (VPC, Transit Gateway, VPC Lattice), IAM, serverless services (Lambda, Batch, API Gateway), containers (EKS), and managed data stores.
- Focus on security, including least-privilege IAM, OAuth2/OIDC, and designing for compliance.
- Ability and willingness to build prototypes as well as write technical papers that set direction.
- Ability to lead through influence and collaboration, build trust with engineers, managers, and executives, and work without ego.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Treat cost efficiency as a design requirement.
Responsibilities
- Own system architecture as it connects to cloud architecture, mapping services, data, and jobs to AWS and defining practical migration paths from legacy architectures.
- Partner with Product Engineering teams to address architecture problems, prototype solutions, unblock work, and leave teams with architectures they can own.
- Serve as technical lead for the AWS relationship and work with AWS solutions architects on service guidance and roadmaps.
- Build proofs of concept and reference implementations using Terraform, Python, Java, and similar tools, and explain the trade-offs behind proposed patterns.
- Work with Cloud Enablement to advance AWS self-service and guardrails, including HCP Terraform workflows, Sentinel policies, IAM, and account and sandbox strategy.
- Design for cloud and AI cost efficiency, including attribution, tagging, and controls.
- Lead architecture for SaaS maturity and compliance readiness, including disaster recovery, business continuity, security, performance, dependency ownership, and cloud-account standardization.
- Guide architecture for agentic workloads on AWS, including AgentCore Gateway, Bedrock, OAuth, and machine-to-machine identity, in partnership with InfoSec.
- Collaborate with the Technical Leadership Team to shape technical direction.
- Record decisions in ADRs and RFCs and share them across teams.
- Mentor senior engineers and run workshops on cloud-native best practices.
Benefits
- Equity for all employees, both when they start and as they continue to grow.
- Career development programs.
- Corporate giving programs.
- Employee resource groups (ERGs) and communities.
- Robust time off policies.
- Daily free lunch.
- New car discount.
- Meditation and fitness apps.
- Commuting cost coverage.
- The role may qualify for discretionary bonuses or incentives and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
