Principal Software Engineer - Marketplace

Be essential at Cars Commerce

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.

 About us:

At Cars Commerce, we’re passionate about helping shoppers meet their perfect car match, and job seekers their perfect career match. Our culture of openness, growth, innovation, and diversity starts with people. Every day we’re hyper-focused on helping people find their perfect match, build relationships, and deliver results. We welcome hard conversations and collaborate with each other to find solutions while focusing on the outcome at hand. Cars.com has revolutionized the automotive industry for both shoppers and sellers alike through technology, and we’d love to have you join us to boldly ride into the future.

Your role  [100% remote. May require onsite interviews]:

Our mission on the Marketplace Engineering team is to build a trusted marketplace that facilitates a simple, fun, and fast experience for car buyers and sellers. By joining our team you will be in the driver’s seat as we build novel Full Stack solutions that support frictionless experiences for our users throughout the automotive ecosystem, and across the Cars.com website (and MobileApp experiences)

Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce. Our Marketplace Engineering Team (cars.com) is on a transformative journey, building innovative services that will redefine the way we deliver value. As a Principal Software Engineer you will lead the cars.com  domain at Cars Commerce. An exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our platforms and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact on the industry

This is an exciting role because as a Principal Software Engineer with the Marketplace (Cars.com) team, you will help tens of millions of people like you and me find their perfect car match each year, with our 4.7 star rated Android and 4.8 star rated iOS apps being a critical part of our strategy. 

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer with 10+ years of aggregate software engineering experience to architect and evangelize how we bridge our backend services to power our mobile apps via GraphQL.

This opportunity enables you to…

• Drive technical excellence by championing best practices in software design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across the organization

• Have a high degree of agency, autonomy, and ambiguity: You’ll work with our platform and feature teams as well as our iOS and Android mobile engineering team to determine technical needs and constraints. 

• Act as a trusted partner and advisor to the Marketplace teams —aligning technical solutions with business goals, guiding complex decisions, and balancing near-term delivery with long-term scalability

• Be a leader and a mentor – enabling teams around you to deliver effectively and efficiently. Outside of engineering, you’ll be working with cross-functional teams such as product, marketing, analytics, and data to understand our short-term and long-term business objectives and need to reconcile competing demands, constraints, and requirements across all of these stakeholders in order to devise technical solutions.

• Lead by example through hands-on contributions to high-impact, cross-functional projects, embedding with engineering teams to guide architecture, design, and implementation decisions

• Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, and trust by building strong relationships across teams, encouraging open communication, and influencing through empathy and credibility

• Mentor and support engineers across all levels, helping them grow in technical depth, architectural thinking, and leadership skills

• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends, identifying opportunities to modernize our tech stack and improve development velocity

• Socialize and implement this solution, taking particular care to ensure we have tight feedback loops so we can practice continuous improvement and ensuring the entire organization is ascribing to the best practices you put forth.

• Leader and a force multiplier. Not only will you bridge systems technically, you’ll be bridging the gap between organizations to ensure that we can all arrive at the best solution we can given the information we have available. 

You bring: 

• 10+ years of software engineering experience

• 5+ years of experience architecting high-traffic, large-scale distributed software systems and establishing best practices

• Knowledge of how to craft a vision for a technical platform, weighing both business and technical goals and concerns, and effectively selling that vision to decision makers as well as the individuals chartered to execute upon that vision

• The ability to create training programs to onboard engineers onto new technologies, systems, and architectures, and up-level those already privy

• Technical knowledge from working with web and mobile apps, either backend systems that support the apps or the apps themselves

• Experience being a technical leader in a 100% remote environment, influencing stakeholders across design, engineering, and technology, both within your own organization and across an enterprise

• Bonus : AI Agent development experience and/or knowledge

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• 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

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. California Applicants: Click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Applicants. For current employees, please click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Employees.