Senior Principal Software Development Engineer, Consumer AI Architect

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 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.

• 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

• 10+ years of experience architecting resilient, scalable systems and leading technical direction across multiple teams…