Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Cars Commerce is dedicated to simplifying the car buying and selling process through innovative technology solutions. The Staff Software Engineer will play a key role in revitalizing backend services and tooling, driving meaningful change and scalability within the automotive industry.
Responsibilities
- 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
Skills
- 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
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation, providing prompt incident resolution and conducting postmortems to improve system reliability
- 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
Benefits
- Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
- New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up
- Generous PTO
- Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day
Company Overview