Staff Software Engineer

Cars.com•Chicago, IL

31d•Remote

About The Position

Cars Commerce is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Websites Engineering Team. This role focuses on platform modernization, specifically revitalizing backend services and tooling for the Dealer Inspire platform. The engineer will help build scalable systems and redefine how value is delivered to customers. This is an opportunity to shape the future of the platform and make a lasting impact in the automotive industry by designing and developing performance-optimized backend systems that scale across Dealer Inspire.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
10+ years of experience in backend software development with a strong focus on designing, building, and operating large-scale and highly available systems, including microservices architectures, APIs, and event-driven systems
3+ years of experience architecting and building cloud-native solutions on AWS, leveraging services such as EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, and Lambda, including deploying, monitoring, and scaling applications in production environments
Strong system design skills with the ability to evaluate trade-offs, drive consensus, and document design decisions effectively
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
Proven experience mentoring engineers and supporting their growth in technical depth, architecture, and leadership
Experience modernizing legacy systems and upgrading legacy technology stacks.
Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and gRPC, with the ability to select the most appropriate interface for given technical and business requirements
In-depth knowledge of relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB) data stores, caching strategies (e.g., Redis), and messaging systems (e.g., Kafka), with demonstrated experience implementing these at scale
Proven experience building observability into systems using tools like DataDog or OpenTelemetry to ensure performance, reliability, and uptime
Understanding of modern application security principles, including secure API design, data encryption, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), and role-based access control
Familiarity with DevSecOps practices, including CI/CD pipeline implementation, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and security integration throughout the software development lifecycle

Nice To Haves

Experience with the Node ecosystem is preferred.
Candidates without Node experience but with a strong background in distributed systems, services, APIs, and backend development who are willing to learn new technologies are encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

Define and drive reusable, reliable, and scalable back-end architectures across the Cars Commerce platform and integrations.
Lead the design, work breakdown, and development of high-performance, API-based backend services that meet service-level objectives (SLOs) and scale with growing business demands.
Champion technical excellence by promoting best practices in system design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across the team.
Work closely with engineering, design, and product partners across teams to align on back-end strategies and standards, elevate the use of back-end, API and integration consistency, and reduce duplication.
Serve as a back-end thought leader and mentor, coaching other engineers and shaping team/department-wide best practices.
Treat components and libraries as products. Develop excellent documentation, innovative usage patterns, and internal developer experience.
Collaborate with backend developers to integrate UIs with APIs. While your focus is back-end, you’re comfortable navigating the full stack.
Participate in an on-call rotation, providing prompt incident resolution and conducting postmortems to improve system reliability.