Lead Software Engineer

Cars Commerce is dedicated to simplifying the car buying and selling process through innovative technology. The Lead Software Engineer will play a crucial role in building and scaling high-throughput, API-first services that enhance the company's core capabilities and support its growth in the automotive industry.

Responsibilities:

• 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 company vision
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner with product managers, engineering teams, and infrastructure teams to define technical requirements and design scalable, maintainable system architectures that align with business goals and product roadmaps
• Implement DevSecOps Practices: Champion and implement continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, automated testing, and security practices throughout the development lifecycle to ensure the reliability, observability and security of production systems
• Drive Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Ensure comprehensive documentation of API designs, system architectures, and operational procedures to enable internal teams and external customers to easily build and integrate with the APIs in a self-service manner

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of experience in backend development with a strong focus on designing, building, and operating large-scale and highly available systems, including microservices architectures, APIs, and event-driven systems
• Proven track record of successfully delivering high-quality software in a fast-paced Agile environment
• Strong collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams and adapt to changing requirements
• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS and containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, including deploying, monitoring, and scaling applications in production
• In-depth experience with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and gRPC, with the ability to select the appropriate design pattern for different use cases and requirements
• Solid understanding of relational and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and messaging systems, with hands-on experience in implementing these technologies at scale
• Proven experience designing and implementing observability solutions (e.g., DataDog) to ensure system reliability, performance, and uptime in production
• Solid understanding of security principles, including data encryption, access control, and secure API design
• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices, including implementing CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and integrating security throughout the development lifecycle
• 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 with Elixir and Phoenix framework is a plus
• Candidates without Elixir experience but with a strong background in distributed systems, services, APIs, and backend development who are willing to learn new technologies are encouraged to apply