Manager, Software Engineering

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, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community.

Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challengeand Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard.

It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.

About the role (Remote, may require onsite interviews)

Join us in shaping a future of Automotive Commerce. Cars Commerce builds solutions for automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers. Our driving force is to deliver a single platform that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars.

Our Websites Engineering Team drives our Dealer Inspire platform. We are embarking on a transformational journey, building innovative and integrated services that redefine how we deliver value to our customers.

Cars Commerce is unifying the car‑buying journey on a single, data‑driven platform, and Core Services supplies the identity, inventory, lead‑delivery and data‑streaming capabilities on which every brand in our portfolio relies. As an Engineering Manager, you'll guide an autonomous team that owns several high‑throughput, API‑first services and an end‑user web application that serves our dealer customers.

As an Engineering Manager on our Websites Engineering Team, you will help revitalize our customer‑facing tooling across our platform with a comprehensive technical strategy to simplify and amplify these user experiences and the capabilities they enable. This is an exceptional opportunity to shape the future of our platform and drive meaningful change at scale, making a lasting impact within the automotive industry.

About You

As an Engineering Manager (Dealer Inspire's Consumer Engagement Team), you will lead a newly formed team responsible for the “heartbeat” of our digital experience. The Consumer Engagement team has been tasked with building a real‑time interaction layer between car buyers and dealerships, processing millions of signals to create personalized, frictionless journeys, generating actionable leads for our customers.

You’ll work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with Product Leadership to turn quarterly and yearly business goals into an incremental, measurable roadmap; champion sound engineering practices around observability, security, modular architecture, and on‑call health; and serve as incident commander and steward of production reliability for your domain.

Beyond your immediate team, you’ll influence both backend platform architecture and front‑end component strategy, shape cross‑domain integrations that unlock new revenue streams, and help set the technical direction for the wider organization.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you cultivate psychological safety, celebrate diverse viewpoints and believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Your curiosity, bias for action, and commitment to inclusive leadership matter more than a perfect skills match — so if the mission excites you, we encourage you to apply.

You will oversee the engineering behind our lead generation tools, website consumer profiles, and modern retailing components.

Why You'll Be Excited About This Role

• Managing a high‑performing team of 8‑12 Software Engineers. You will be responsible for technical mentorship, career growth, and fostering a culture of ownership and engineering excellence.
• Overseeing the implementation and scaling of event‑routing frameworks (e.g., Rudderstack) to ensure consumer data is captured and routed accurately across our ecosystem.
• Leading the design of robust message layers and job queues to ensure re‑playability, reliability, and performance.
• Owning the technology stack for UI components driven by the supporting services your team creates to enable native integration into our Website Platform.
• Driving the development of a Unified Consumer Profile API, ensuring it serves as a high‑performance, low‑latency source of truth for personalization efforts across all of our dealership websites.
• Implementing distributed observability patterns to monitor complex, multi‑service transaction flows, ensuring we meet strict SLOs.
• Collaborating with Product and Data Teams to use feature‑performance dashboards to help prioritize the Product roadmap and create actionable insights for Cars Commerce.

We're Excited About You Because...

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong emphasis on API development and distributed systems.
• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams in an agile environment.
• Technical Proficiency:
  • Experience with Message Brokers/Streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and managing asynchronous job processing; experience architecting event driven systems.
  • Hands‑on experience with Event Stream Processing (e.g., Rudderstack, Segment, or similar).
  • Familiarity with WebSockets and building real‑time, stateful applications.
  • Experience with personalization engines and how to leverage consumer data to tailor digital experiences in real‑time.
• Observability Mindset: Experience implementing distributed tracing and advanced monitoring in a microservices environment.
• Domain Expertise: Understanding of Personalization engines and how to leverage consumer data to tailor digital experiences in real‑time.
• Collaborative Leadership: Ability to work with cross‑functional teams to translate a “Data‑Driven Vision” into technical reality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience transitioning legacy “monolith” retail tools into a modern, event‑driven architecture.
• Background in automotive digital retailing or high‑volume e‑commerce.
• Strong opinions on API design and contract‑first development.

Salary Range

Base salary range: $135,300.00-169,150.00

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package Includes

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set‑Up
• Generous PTO
• Refuel - a service‑based recognition program where employees receive additional paid time away to learn grow and reset
• Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day

For US‑based Positions

Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. Please note that we are unable to sponsor employment visas at this time.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Applicants: Click here to review our Privacy Policy for Applicants.

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