Sr. Manager, Software Engineering

Cars.com • Chicago, IL

1d • Remote

About The Position

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, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, 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 Challengeand 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. Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce. Our Dealer Insights team is on a transformation journey, building innovative services and redefining how we deliver value to our customers. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will help revitalize our customer-facing products across our cars.com with a comprehensive technical strategy to simplify and amplify these user experiences and the capabilities they enable. This is an exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our platform and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact within the automotive industry. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you'll guide an autonomous team that delivers value to our dealer customers. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Product leadership to turn quarterly and yearly business goals into an incremental, measurable roadmap; champion sound engineering practices around observability, security, modular architecture, and on-call health; and serve as incident commander and steward of production reliability for your domain. Beyond your immediate team, you'll influence both backend platform architecture and front-end component strategy, shape cross-domain integrations that unlock new revenue streams, and help set the technical direction for the wider organization. You’re an empathetic, customer centric leader who drives solutions and balances people, process and product. Perhaps you’ve shipped high-scale solutions handling thousands of requests per second, mentored senior engineers and first-time managers, or negotiated scope changes without losing sight of customer value—but you still see yourself as a lifelong learner who uses data rather than dogma to improve. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you cultivate psychological safety, celebrate diverse viewpoints and believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Even if Elixir, TypeScript, or automotive retail isn’t already on your résumé, your curiosity, bias for action, and commitment to inclusive leadership matter more than a perfect skills match—so if the mission excites you, we encourage you to apply.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering with 5+ years leading engineers; proven track record shipping and operating business-critical backend services and front-end web applications at scale.
• Strong background in cloud-native architectures (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), event-driven and API-driven systems; understanding of component libraries, modular front-end systems; comfortable reviewing designs for scalability, resilience, and cost.
• Demonstrated ability to plan, forecast capacity, and use Jira, DORA, and DX metrics to drive predictable outcomes and continuous improvement.
• Skilled at coaching senior/staff engineers, giving direct and constructive feedback, resolving conflict, and fostering an inclusive, high-trust culture aligned with company values.
• Comfortable co-authoring OKRs, making scope/risk trade-offs, and communicating decisions to executives and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Familiar with incident management best practices, observability stacks (DataDog), vulnerability remediation, and DevSecOps pipelines.
• Able to tailor technical and non-technical narratives to engineers, product managers, and executives alike; proven record of influencing beyond direct authority.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Elixir/Phoenix and/or TypeScript/Deno/Next.JS technology stacks.

Responsibilities

• Lead full-stack delivery: Direct one or more teams that own several backend services and front-end applications; own the end-to-end delivery of the domain roadmap; set clear objectives, groom several sprints of backlog, and hold the bar on Jira hygiene and velocity transparency.
• Drive product road-mapping & prioritization: Serve as a strategic partner to Product Managers to translate business goals into measurable milestones and customer outcomes; balance new feature work with technical debt and platform investments.
• Coach, develop, and scale talent: Provide frequent 1-1s, actionable feedback, and growth plans for senior engineers and leads; mentor emerging managers as the org expands; cultivate a diverse, inclusive culture of psychological safety and continuous learning.
• Steward production reliability & security: Own SLOs, on-call rotations, incident command, and post-mortem learning; ensure adherence to security and compliance maintenance guidelines and vulnerability-remediation SLAs.
• Operational excellence through metrics: Use a data-driven approach to continuous improvement, monitoring DORA, change-failure rate, incident MTTR, and CapEx accuracy; initiate improvement plans when trends deviate from targets.
• Architectural guidance & modernization: Review designs for extensibility, backwards compatibility, and cost efficiency (backend); guide the technical strategy for reusable components, modular architecture, and developer ergonomics (frontend); promote modern practices in CI/CD, observability, and DevSecOps across all owned systems.
• Cross-functional influence: Coordinate integrations with adjacent domains, negotiate timelines and API contracts, and represent Core Services in company-wide program reviews.
• Hiring & org shaping: Partner with Talent Acquisition to build a diverse pipeline, run structured interviews, and make evidence-based hiring decisions; forecast head-count needs as product scope grows.

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