Cars Commerce is a company dedicated to simplifying the car buying and selling process through innovative technology. The role of Staff Software Engineer - Frontend involves leading the development of reusable front-end architectures and optimizing user experiences across the platform, while collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Responsibilities:
- Lead Front-End Architecture: Define and drive reusable, reliable, and scalable front-end architectures across the Cars Commerce platform experiences
- Author and Evolve Component Libraries: Lead design and development of shared UI components and design systems, with attention to accessibility, theming, maintainability, and developer ergonomics
- Champion UX and Front-End Performance: Optimize user-focused performance across browsers and devices. Partner with design and product to improve interactivity and visual fidelity
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with engineering, design, and product partners across teams to align on front-end strategies and standards, elevate UI consistency, and reduce duplication
- Mentorship and Influence: Serve as a front-end thought leader and mentor, coaching other engineers and shaping team/department-wide best practices
- Drive Documentation and DX: Treat components and libraries as products. Develop excellent documentation, innovative usage patterns, and internal developer experience
- Contribute Full-Stack as Needed: Collaborate with backend developers to integrate UIs with APIs. While your focus is front-end, you’re comfortable navigating the full stack
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
- 10+ years of experience in frontend engineering, including a deep knowledge of JavaScript (and TypeScript), having working familiarity with, but no loyalty to, multiple frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, etc)
- Expert-level understanding of browser fundamentals: HTML, CSS (Flexbox, Grid), DOM, event lifecycle, rendering, and performance tuning
- Strong experience using browser dev tools across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. for layout debugging, JS tracing, and performance profiling
- Demonstrated experience architecting and maintaining component-based design systems with support for theming, responsive behavior, and accessibility
- Passion for user experience, developer ergonomics, and performance measurement (including Core Web Vitals)
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, influence others, and align multiple teams around technical direction
- Solid understanding of working with back-end technologies, architectural patterns, RESTful APIs, and authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth, JWT, etc.)
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation, providing prompt incident resolution, and conducting postmortems to improve system reliability
- Experience building production applications using a Server Driven UI (SDUI) approach to build across web and mobile clients
- Experience working in a platform or SaaS company