Software Engineer II

Cox Automotive's Common Consumer team (Stratos) builds the distributed services platform that powers consumer experiences across the Cox Auto portfolio. Our services — orchestration services, rules engines, data resources, and consumer-facing UIs — are consumed by adopter teams across the company to deliver features to millions of car shoppers, owners, and sellers. We run cloud-native, multi-region, event-driven infrastructure on AWS and operate within a SAFe Agile Release Train, connecting platform capabilities to measurable business outcomes.

• Develop and maintain the team's core eventing infrastructure (Eventing 2.0) — the event bus, message contracts, publishers/consumers, and integration points that other CRM teams and downstream systems rely on, working from designs and direction set by senior engineers.
• Diagnose and resolve issues in high-throughput, high-availability eventing pipelines, including message delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, and dead-letter handling.
• Partner with consuming teams and senior engineers to implement event schemas/contracts and support backward-compatible evolution of the eventing platform.
• Write clean, efficient, and testable code using C#, .NET, and related frameworks.
• Contribute to broader Skynet shared services beyond eventing, including WAF protections and dealership-facing dashboard capabilities, as priorities require.
• Participate in the software development lifecycle with a primary focus on coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance, while gaining exposure to requirements gathering and design.
• Collaborate with product managers, UX designers, and other engineers to deliver features aligned with business needs.
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to peers.
• Contribute to improving development processes and best practices, including test strategy and quality gates for eventing changes.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, and 2+ years' experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and up to 2 years' experience; or 14 years' experience in a related field.
• 2–4 years of professional experience in software development.
• Some exposure to event-driven architecture and message-based systems (message queues, pub/sub, event buses), or a strong willingness to learn — this is the team's core focus area, and mentorship will be provided.
• Proficiency in object-oriented programming and design patterns.
• Experience with web technologies and frameworks (ASP.NET, C#, REST APIs).
• Familiarity with relational databases (SQL Server) and cloud platforms (AWS).
• Willingness to learn distributed systems concepts such as eventual consistency, idempotency, message ordering, and failure/retry handling, with support from the team.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, especially in diagnosing issues across asynchronous, multi-service flows.
• Experience with, or strong curiosity to incorporate, AI into development such as Agentic coding and AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code).
• Applicants must currently be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship. No OPT, CPT, STEM/OPT or visa sponsorship now or in future.
• Availability for rotational on-call duties outside of standard business hours may be required.
• Kansas City based candidates only - in office 3 days a week is required.

• Substantial personal responsibility and autonomy; ability to plan and manage your own work.
• Strong communication skills, able to collaborate with technical and non-technical audiences.
• Enjoys sharing knowledge with peers and supporting junior engineers through code review and pairing.
• Stays current with emerging technologies and helps the team adopt useful new practices.
• Commitment to ethical AI use and contributing to a positive, inclusive team culture.
• Ability to rapidly absorb new information and apply it effectively to solve complex problems.

• Architecture:
  Event-driven / eventing pipelines (Eventing 2.0), message bus and pub/sub patterns, shared services architecture, Web Application Firewall (WAF) integration
• C#, .NET (including active modernization toward .NET 10), Java Script
• Messaging/Eventing:
  Event bus and message queue infrastructure (e.g., AWS SQS/SNS/Event Bridge or equivalent), schema/contract management for cross-team event consumers
• Cloud: AWS (including AWS Lambda), CDN infrastructure
• Databases: SQL Server
• Dev Ops Tools:
  Git Hub Actions, Rally (agile planning)
• Testing:
  Automated test strategy practices, unit/integration testing frameworks, with particular attention to test coverage for asynchronous eventing flows
• AI Tools:
  Claude Code