Lead Sr. Software Engineer

Overview

Be Essential At Cars Commerce. At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, , our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, Accu Trade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealer club, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.

This is a 100% remote role. May require onsite interviews.

Join us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce. At Cars Commerce, our Core Engineering Services (Leads Team) is on a mission to deliver one platform that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars, unifying the car-buying journey on a single, data-driven platform.

Our leads platform is the powerhouse behind the leads services in our business. We own the engine that captures, routes, and delivers leads across Cars Commerce—connecting ready-to-buy shoppers with dealerships at the exact moment they're ready to act. We're integrated with major CRM systems, processing leads in real-time, and scaling to handle the majority of lead delivery across the business.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll own critical pieces of this platform: designing APIs that business units depend on and ensuring every lead makes it from shoppers to dealerships without a hitch. Your services fuels our platform’s capabilities, directly supporting the growth and tighter integration of our existing brands like New Cars, Used Cars, Car Dealers, Prices & Reviews | , Dealer Inspire, and Accu Trade, which collectively support millions of users each month.

This is an incredible opportunity to make a direct impact. You’ll collaborate closely with Engineering and Product leadership to translate bold business goals into reliable, incremental outcomes. You will drive best-in-class engineering practices around scalability, observability, security, and reliability in your daily work. As you grow in the role, you’ll have the chance to deepen your technical expertise, own larger features and systems development, and contribute significantly to our architectural direction.

Join us and build the core capabilities that are redefining how the automotive industry shares Leads!

You are an experienced, results-driven Lead Software Engineer who thrives in building scalable and reliable backend systems. You have a strong foundation in designing and developing API-based services that can handle high traffic volumes while ensuring performance, security, and maintainability. You deeply understand software architecture and engineering best practices and are comfortable making strategic technical decisions that balance immediate speed and quality with long-term architectural runway and stability.

You’re comfortable with both hands-on coding and providing technical direction on building backend services that meet evolving product requirements. You understand the importance of testing, observability, and CI/CD pipelines in delivering reliable systems.

You are a systems thinker who can see commonalities and connections across multiple use cases and design solutions that can be utilized internally and externally. Above all, you’re passionate about creating core capabilities and services that empower product teams to innovate quickly and reliably.

This opportunity enables you to...

• Design and Develop Strategic, Scalable Systems:
  Lead the architecture, design, and development of high-performance, API-based backend services, making strategic, forward-looking architectural decisions that meet service level objectives (SLOs) and scale to support long-term, growing business needs.
• Define Technical Strategy:
  Analyze current state, anticipate future technical challenges, and help define the technical roadmap for your domain, ensuring architectural choices are scalable, sustainable, and align with the broader…