Staff Software Engineer

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 Challenge and 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. We are proud to be named one of Built In's 2026 Best Places to Work in Chicago and across the U.S. Ready to make your mark? Join a team that's driving real change in the automotive industry.

About the Role [Remote and must be located in Chicago area. May require onsite interviews]

Join us in shaping a future of Automotive Commerce. Cars Commerce builds solutions for automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers. Our driving force is to deliver a single platform that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars.

Our Websites Engineering Team drives our Dealer Inspire platform. We are embarking on a transformational journey, building innovative and integrated services that redefine how we deliver value to our customers. As a Staff Software Engineer on our Websites Engineering Team, you will help revitalize our backend services and tooling across our platform with a comprehensive technical strategy to simplify and build scalable systems. This is an exceptional opportunity to shape the future of our platform and drive meaningful change at scale, making a lasting impact within the automotive industry.

You’ll work across team boundaries to design and develop components as well as performance-optimized back-end systems that scale across Dealer Inspire - Websites Engineering Team.

About You

You’re an experienced, results-oriented, Backend Staff Software Engineer who blends technical depth with product sensitivity. You’ve built and evolved design systems. You understand APIs integrations and scaling systems. You’re thoughtful about code ergonomics and thrive on creating tools other engineers love using. You can zoom out to architect reusable patterns, platforms and zoom in to debug specific code related issues.

You are a systems thinker who can see commonalities and connections across multiple use cases and design solutions that can be utilized internally and externally alike. Above all, you’re passionate about creating core capabilities and components that empower product and platform teams to innovate quickly and reliably.

This opportunity enables you to...

• Lead Backend Architecture: 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
• Cross-Team Collaboration: 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.
• Mentorship and Influence: Serve as a back-end thought leader and mentor, coaching other engineers and shaping team/department-wide best practices.
• Drive Documentation and DX: Treat components and libraries as products. Develop excellent documentation, innovative usage patterns, and internal developer experience.
• Contribute Full-Stack as Needed: Collaborate with backend developers to integrate UIs with APIs. While your focus is back-end, you’re comfortable navigating the full stack.

• 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
• 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.
• 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
• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation, providing prompt incident resolution and conducting postmortems to improve system reliability