Senior Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Architecture

Car Gurus

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.

What we do

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!

Role overview

Car Gurus is hiring a Senior Principal Software Engineer to be the hands-on cloud architect within our Engineering Platform (EP) organization. We have finished a large lift-and-shift to AWS. The next step is helping 300+ engineers build cloud-native, SaaS-ready software that is resilient, secure, and built to scale. In this role you will work hands-on, side by side with the teams doing the work.

You won't belong to a single squad. Instead, you will go wherever the hardest system and cloud architecture problems are, partner with teams to solve them, and leave behind patterns that others can reuse.

What you'll do

• Own system architecture as it connects to cloud architecture: shape how services, data, and jobs map onto AWS, and lay out practical paths from old architectures to new ones.
• Partner with Product Engineering teams on their architecture problems. This may mean working closely with a team for a period of time to prototype, help unblock them, and leave behind an architecture they can own.
• Act as the technical lead for our AWS relationship. You'll work with AWS solutions architects on service guidance and roadmaps.
• Build proofs of concept and reference implementations in code, using Terraform, Python, Java, and similar tools, that teams can build on and that can evolve into standard patterns over time. Explain the trade-offs behind each one.
• Work with Cloud Enablement to advance AWS self-service and guardrails: HCP Terraform workflows, Sentinel policies, IAM, and account and sandbox strategy.
• Design architecture with cost in mind across cloud and AI spend, including attribution, tagging, and controls.
• Lead architecture for SaaS maturity and compliance readiness, covering disaster recovery and business continuity, security, performance, dependency ownership, and standardizing our cloud accounts.
• Guide architecture for agentic workloads on AWS, such as Agent Core Gateway, Bedrock, OAuth, and machine-to-machine identity, in partnership with Info Sec.
• Collaborate with our Technical Leadership Team to shape technical direction. Record decisions in ADRs and RFCs and spread them across teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and run workshops on cloud-native best practices.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years designing and running production systems on AWS.
• A software engineer first: you write production-quality code in at least one of Java, Python, Type Script, or Go.
• Fluent in infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Deep AWS expertise across networking (VPC, Transit Gateway, VPC Lattice), IAM, serverless (Lambda, Batch,…