Software Engineer, Backend Developer, Cloud Engineer - Software

Overview

Cars Commerce builds solutions for automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers, aiming to simplify every aspect of buying and selling cars.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Websites Engineering Team, you will revitalize backend services and tooling across our platform, driving scalable systems and technical strategy. The role is remote, but candidates must be located in the Chicago area and may be required to attend onsite interviews.

• Define and drive reusable, reliable, and scalable backend architectures across the Cars Commerce platform and integrations.
• Design, work out and develop high-performance, API-based backend services that meet SLOs and scale with growing business demands.
• Champion technical excellence by promoting best practices in system design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across the team.
• Work closely with engineering, design, and product partners across teams to align on backend strategies and standards, elevate backend API and integration consistency, and reduce duplication.
• Serve as a back-end thought leader and mentor, coaching other engineers and shaping team or department-wide best practices.
• Treat components and libraries as products, developing excellent documentation, innovative usage patterns, and internal developer experience.
• Collaborate with backend developers to integrate UIs with APIs, providing full-stack support when necessary.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of backend software development experience focused on designing, building and operating large-scale, highly available systems.
• 3+ years of experience architecting cloud-native solutions on AWS, leveraging services such as EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, and Lambda, and handling deployment, monitoring and scaling in production.
• Strong experience in the Node ecosystem preferred; willingness to learn new technologies otherwise.
• Excellent system design skills, ability to evaluate trade-offs, drive consensus and document decisions.
• Proven experience mentoring engineers and fostering technical growth and leadership.
• Modernizing legacy systems and upgrading legacy technology stacks.
• Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, GraphQL, gRPC, selecting the most appropriate interface for technical and business needs.
• In-depth knowledge of relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and No
  
  SQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB) data stores, caching strategies (Redis), and messaging systems (Kafka), with demonstrated implementation at scale.
• Building observability into systems using tools such as Data Dog or Open Telemetry.
• Understanding of modern application security principles, including secure API design, data encryption, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT) and role-based access control.
• Familiarity with Dev Sec Ops  practices including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code and security integration.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotation, incident resolution and post-mortem improvements.

Base salary range: $ – $. Additional compensation may include bonus and equity programs depending on level.

Benefits include:

• Medical, dental and vision healthcare plans
• New‑hire stipend for home office set‑up
• Generous paid time off, floating holidays, volunteer days, recharge day
• Comprehensive benefits package supporting work‑life balance

Cars Commerce is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. We are not sponsoring visas.