Software Development Engineer II

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' Conversion team is looking for a Software Development Engineer II (Backend) to help dealers close more of the leads we send them. We turn shopper activity on our marketplace into a clear picture of who each buyer is and what they're looking for, then recommend the next move to the salesperson working that lead. Thousands of dealerships rely on it every day.

You’ll work in the Java and Spring Boot services behind all of this: enriching each lead as it arrives, consuming high-volume event streams, and serving the APIs that power the dashboards dealers work in. It's a small team, so you'll take real ownership early. You'll partner closely with product, design, and other backend and frontend engineers to move projects from technical design through implementation and launch, and you'll see the result in dealer adoption and close rates.

• Design, build, and ship features in the Java and Spring Boot services that enrich every lead and power the insights dealers act on every day
• Own your work from technical design through testing, code review, and production, with support from the team when you need it
• Work with high-volume event streams and the data behind them (Kafka, MongoDB, Redis) to keep shopper data fresh and APIs fast
• Build intelligence features, including LLM-backed ones, that recommend a dealer's next move rather than just handing them data
• Diagnose and fix production issues across services, share in on-call, and improve the alerting and observability we rely on
• Partner with product and design to break ambiguous problems into scoped, shippable work, with a real say in what we build and how
• Help raise the bar on how we test, deploy, and operate the services we own

• 2-4 years of hands-on software development experience in a professional setting
• Proficiency in Java, ideally with Spring Boot
• Solid working knowledge of MongoDB or another No
  
  SQL datastore, and comfort with SQL
• Practical understanding of RESTful API design, microservices, and distributed systems, including event streams or message queues (Kafka, SQS, or similar) and caching trade-offs
• Hands-on experience with AWS and cloud infrastructure
• A strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis
• A habit of writing automated tests, and a sense for which tests a change actually needs
• Experience or interest in leveraging AI coding tools to accelerate development (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor)
• Nice to have:
  Python, and hands-on experience with LLM or agent frameworks such as Lang Chain or Lang Graph
• Clear communication, curiosity, and a bias toward shipping, with genuine interest in learning the…