Principal Software Engineer

Cars Commerce is dedicated to simplifying car buying and selling through innovative technology. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the cars.com domain, influencing the future of their platforms and driving meaningful change to enhance user experiences in the automotive ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Drive technical excellence by championing best practices in software design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across the organization
• Have a high degree of agency, autonomy, and ambiguity: You’ll work with our platform and feature teams as well as our iOS and Android mobile engineering team to determine technical needs and constraints
• Act as a trusted partner and advisor to the Marketplace teams —aligning technical solutions with business goals, guiding complex decisions, and balancing near-term delivery with long-term scalability
• Be a leader and a mentor – enabling teams around you to deliver effectively and efficiently. Outside of engineering, you’ll be working with cross-functional teams such as product, marketing, analytics, and data to understand our short-term and long-term business objectives and need to reconcile competing demands, constraints, and requirements across all of these stakeholders in order to devise technical solutions
• Lead by example through hands-on contributions to high-impact, cross-functional projects, embedding with engineering teams to guide architecture, design, and implementation decisions
• Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, and trust by building strong relationships across teams, encouraging open communication, and influencing through empathy and credibility
• Mentor and support engineers across all levels, helping them grow in technical depth, architectural thinking, and leadership skills
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends, identifying opportunities to modernize our tech stack and improve development velocity
• Socialize and implement this solution, taking particular care to ensure we have tight feedback loops so we can practice continuous improvement and ensuring the entire organization is ascribing to the best practices you put forth
• Leader and a force multiplier. Not only will you bridge systems technically, you’ll be bridging the gap between organizations to ensure that we can all arrive at the best solution we can given the information we have available

Requirements:

• 10+ years of aggregate software engineering experience
• 5+ years of experience architecting high-traffic, large-scale distributed software systems and establishing best practices
• Knowledge of how to craft a vision for a technical platform, weighing both business and technical goals and concerns, and effectively selling that vision to decision makers as well as the individuals chartered to execute upon that vision
• The ability to create training programs to onboard engineers onto new technologies, systems, and architectures, and up-level those already privy
• Technical knowledge from working with web and mobile apps, either backend systems that support the apps or the apps themselves
• Experience being a technical leader in a 100% remote environment, influencing stakeholders across design, engineering, and technology, both within your own organization and across an enterprise
• AI Agent development experience and/or knowledge