Principal Software Engineer, ATA

Who we are

At Car Gurus (NASDAQ: CARG), 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!

Car Gurus is looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer to help define and deliver the next generation of car recommendations for millions of shoppers. The Recommendations Team helps shoppers find the right cars by surfacing relevant vehicles, and helpful next steps across search, listings, saved cars, and AI-powered experiences.

In this role, you will provide technical leadership across the recommendation domain, from shopper understanding and preference signals to ranking, personalization, experimentation, reliability, and the product experiences that make recommendations useful and trustworthy. You will work closely with Data Science, Product, and other engineering teams to turn advances in machine learning and AI into intuitive consumer experiences that help shoppers find the right car faster.

You'll shape architecture and technical strategy, write code, mentor engineers, and work closely with teams across Car Gurus.

• Set the technical direction for our recommendation platform and drive architecture across multiple teams.
• Build scalable recommendation systems using shopper, vehicle, inventory, and behavioral signals.
• Partner with Data Science to product ionize models and continuously improve recommendation quality.
• Drive personalization, ranking, experimentation, and AI-powered recommendation experiences throughout the shopper journey.
• Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives from technical design through delivery and measurement.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence of recommendation services.
• Influence technical decisions across the organization, mentor engineers, and raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews.
• Leverage AI-assisted development to accelerate delivery while maintaining high standards for quality, security, and reliability.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale, customer-facing systems.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar field.
• Deep expertise in software architecture, distributed systems, APIs, and production engineering.
• Experience leading technical direction across teams and driving complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Strong experience with Kotlin, Java, C#, Python, or similar languages;
  Kotlin is preferred.
• Strong SQL and relational database experience, including performance considerations.
• Experience partnering with Data Science or ML teams to bring models into production.
• Excellent communication and influence skills, with a track record of aligning technical and cross-functional partners.
• Hands-on technical leadership, including coding, architecture, design reviews, and mentoring engineers.
• Curiosity about AI and experience using AI to improve products and engineering productivity.
• Experience building recommendation, personalization, search, ranking, marketplace, or discovery systems.
• Experience with machine learning platforms, real-time or batch feature pipelines, experimentation systems, model evaluation, or recommendation metrics.
• Experience building consumer products that help users compare options, make decisions, or navigate a complex purchase journey.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures, event-driven systems, streaming data, and high-volume services.

The displayed range represents the expected annual base salary / On-Target…