Principal Software Engineer, DevX Architecture

Developer Experience Architecture Role

At Car Gurus, our mission is to give people the power to reach their destination. We started as a small team of developers determined to bring trust and transparency to car shopping. Since then, our history of innovation and go-to-market acceleration has driven industry-leading growth. In fact, we're the largest and fastest-growing automotive marketplace, and we've been profitable for over 15 years.

The market is evolving, and we are too, moving the entire automotive journey online and guiding our customers through every step. That includes everything from the sale of an old car to the financing, purchase, and delivery of a new one. Today, tens of millions of consumers visit  each month, and 30,000 dealerships use our products. But they're not the only ones who love Car Gurus—our employees do, too.

We have a people-first culture that fosters kindness, collaboration, and innovation, and empowers our Gurus with tools to fuel their career growth. Disrupting a trillion-dollar industry requires fresh and diverse perspectives. Come join us for the ride!

The Developer Experience Architecture team at Car Gurus builds the platforms, tooling, and standards that make hundreds of engineers faster, safer, and more productive. You will work on our highest-leverage initiatives: standardizing AI agentic development (Claude Code, our internal plugin marketplace, and MCP integrations), evolving our authentication and identity platform (Keycloak, OAuth2/OIDC), and improving the paved paths for service and job creation on AWS.

These are complex, cross-cutting problems with global impact. You will own your projects and partner with engineers and product managers across the org. And no, you do not need to know about cars to work here.

• Design and ship developer tooling, core frameworks, and reusable templates that raise engineering productivity and quality
• Advance our agentic development ecosystem:
  Claude Code configuration and governance, plugins and skills, and MCP servers
• Strengthen the Auth service and agent identity model using Keycloak, OAuth2, and OIDC
• Build and operate services with Java, Spring Boot, AWS, and Kubernetes
• Define standards, guardrails, and best practices, then drive adoption across product teams
• Continuously assess, root cause, and improve system reliability and performance
• Define, communicate, and drive technical solutions and complex projects from concept through successful completion, ensuring clear direction, accountability, and measurable outcomes
• Partner effectively across teams to influence decisions, resolve complex technical challenges, and build alignment without relying solely on direct authority
• Demonstrate strong business judgment by prioritizing work based on customer and business impact, translating technical decisions into measurable outcomes, and consistently focusing on delivering meaningful results.

• Eight or more years of hands-on, fullstack software design and development, including at least five years of Java. Experience with client and server side JavaScript, including React, Node, and Remix, along with Terraform experience is a plus
• Experience building performant, large-scale web applications and cloud-native systems on AWS or similar cloud providers
• Working knowledge of authentication and identity standards (OAuth2/OIDC), or a strong appetite to learn them
• Hands-on experience applying modern AI coding tools (assistants, agents, MCP) to real engineering work
• Comfort writing tests, using observability tools, and owning projects end to end
• Curious, collaborative, and eager to learn
• Demonstrated deep expertise in a relevant technical stack, including critical code reviews, scalability, architecture, testing strategy, performance, and cross-team integration.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

We reward our Gurus' curiosity and passion with best-in-class benefits and compensation, including equity for all employees, both when they start and as they continue to grow with us. Our career development and corporate giving programs, as well as our employee resource groups (ERGs)…