Engineering Manager, Developer

Overview

Role Overview:
The Developer Experience (DevX) Architecture team at Car Gurus is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team focused on accelerating developer productivity and delivering architectural improvements for Car Gurus Engineering. The results of your work will impact hundreds of engineers across dozens of product teams on a daily basis. You and your team will take on complex, cross-cutting projects: defining new templates and processes, re-architecting core components, integrating new libraries and frameworks, improving backend performance, and building AI-powered developer tools that give Car Gurus engineers a faster and better experience.

To succeed in this role, you’ll partner closely with engineers and leaders across many teams, learn and adapt quickly, and translate ambiguous problems into clear, high-impact initiatives. You will own your projects end-to-end, lead a team of talented engineers, and collaborate with fellow engineering managers and product partners to solve interesting problems with broad scope.

• Lead and grow a high-performing DevX engineering team, providing coaching, feedback, and clear expectations.
• Set and communicate architectural direction for developer experience, in partnership with Staff/Principal engineers and other platform teams.
• Own a roadmap of technical investments: propose ideas, shape scope, provide estimates, measure, and sequence work to maximize impact on engineering effectiveness.
• Partner across the organization with engineers, managers, and product to deeply understand their pain points and design pragmatic solutions that scale.
• Drive predictable delivery by breaking down ambiguous problems into small, testable increments and releasing value iteratively.
• Lead the full software development lifecycle for your team’s services and tools: design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement, with a strong emphasis on clean, well-tested, and efficient code.
• Identify high leverage/ROI opportunities for AI-assisted development (code assistants, test generation, internal agents), partner with security and compliance to define guardrails, and integrate these capabilities into our SDLC.
• Use technologies like Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes, and AI-assisted development tools to improve our core architecture and platforms.
• Advance and champion engineering best practices (reliability, observability, performance, and security) and help teams adopt them through patterns, templates, and guidance.
• Strategically invest in critical platform areas, such as authentication and other shared services, to reduce risk and unlock faster delivery for product teams.

• 5+ years of hands-on software design and development experience building and operating production systems.
• 3+ years in an Engineering Manager or equivalent technical leadership role, leading teams that ship software in production.
• Experience building and operating large-scale, performant web applications, and familiarity with modern technologies and patterns that enable them (distributed systems, microservices, cloud-native architectures, observability, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with modern strongly typed backend languages (Java, C#, etc) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, etc).
• Hands-on experience with modern AI tools (e.g., code assistants, test generation, or internal agents) and a perspective on how to responsibly apply them to improve developer experience.
• Strong project management and collaboration skills, including experience working across multiple teams and stakeholders in an iterative, agile environment.
• A people-focused technical leader with high emotional intelligence, who can motivate, coach, and develop engineers at different levels.
• A clear, adaptable communicator who can tailor your message for audiences ranging from junior engineers to senior business leaders and third-party vendors.
• A curious, growth-oriented mindset—you enjoy learning new domains, experimenting with new tools, and continually expanding your capabilities.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

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