Senior Principal Software Development Engineer, Consumer AI Architect

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Car Gurus is hiring for a Senior Principal Software Engineer in our Consumer Commerce department – the group responsible for our highest trafficked pages and products. Our mission is to deliver comprehensive, accurate, and engaging vehicle information, fostering trust and driving informed and high-intent consumer decisions, while upholding Car Gurus' standards for innovation, user-centricity, and technical excellence.

In this role, you'll contribute to high-visibility parts of our site, introduce AI to our consumer experiences, and collaborate closely with partners in Product, UX, and Analytics. This is a fast-moving, impact-oriented environment where you will set technical direction across the department, mentor engineers, and drive high-visibility AI initiatives from concept to production at scale.

What you'll do:

• Design, build, and deploy consumer-facing experiences end-to-end to 45 million monthly visitors, from the data and model layer through to the user-facing product, being hands-on and actively participating in the implementation of select initiatives
• Serve as a go-to AI expert and advisor for all Consumer AI projects, providing technical guidance on architecture, design, and implementation choices
• Guide the platform and infrastructure decisions underpinning AI deployments, including storage, memory, request handling and load, evaluation pipelines, observability and analytics
• Evaluate the broader AI framework and tooling landscape, independent of any single language or ecosystem, and guide teams toward the right approach for a given problem; develop proof-of-concepts to validate AI approaches and clearly explain the trade-offs between different technologies
• Build and operate systems using Lang Chain, Lang Graph, and Langfuse in Python to develop, orchestrate, and evaluate agentic and LLM-based applications in production
• Drive the department's adoption of fully agentic programming, defining the patterns, tooling, and best practices engineers follow when building agentic systems
• Partner with engineering leadership, product, and data teams to shape phased platform guidelines and roadmaps for consumer initiatives
• Mentor engineers across teams on system design, evaluation methodology, and operational best practices
• Conduct workshops and produce documentation on AI development, deployment, monitoring, and support practices across multiple teams
• Document architectural decisions in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and share findings and best practices across teams

What you'll bring:

• 10+ years of experience architecting resilient, scalable systems and leading technical direction across multiple teams with extensive experience designing, implementing, and deploying consumer-facing AI experiences in production
• Hands-on experience with Lang Chain, Lang Graph, and Lang Fuse in Python and with the platform and infrastructure layers of AI systems, including storage, memory, load management, evaluations, and observability
• Broad knowledge of the AI framework and tooling landscape beyond Python, with the ability to evaluate and recommend approaches independent of language or ecosystem
• Hands-on full stack experience building well-structured, performant applications across frontend, backend, and the platform and infrastructure layers for production-grade systems, including experience building APIs and REST services in Java and UX applications in React preferred
• Strong communicator with a collaborative spirit who can influence technical direction across multiple teams and disciplines
• Experience working within the AWS ecosystem a plus
• Experience with agentic programming and multi-agent workflows, including guiding teams through adoption of these approaches
• Experience defining engineering patterns and standards that others adopt, and mentoring engineers on architecture and coding practices

Position Pay Range: $191,000—$239,000 USD

Working at Car Gurus:

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…