Lead Software Engineer (Frontend)

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

Join us in shaping the  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.

At Cars Commerce, we’re passionate about helping shoppers meet their perfect car match. Our culture of openness, growth, innovation, and diversity starts with people. Every day we’re hyper-focused on helping people find their perfect match, build relationships, and deliver results. 

Our Marketplace  Engineering Team drives our cars.com platform. We are on a transformational journey, building innovative and integrated services that redefine how we deliver value to our customers and consumers.. As a Lead Software Engineer on our Marketplace  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 [100% remote in the Chicago area. May require onsite interviews]

This is an exciting role because as a Lead Software Engineer with the Marketplace Team, you will help tens of millions of people like you and me find their perfect car match each year, with our 4.7 star rated Android and 4.8 star rated iOS apps being a critical part of our strategy. 

Our mission on the Marketplace Engineering team is to build a trusted marketplace that facilitates a simple, fun, and fast experience for car buyers and sellers.  We are seeking candidates who possess deep expertise in Frontend technologies with exposure to backend, a passion for thoughtful user experience design, and the ability to build services  that are innovative, intuitive, and impactful for our users. 

By joining our team you will be in the driver’s seat as we build novel Full Stack solutions that support frictionless experiences for our users throughout the automotive ecosystem, and across the Cars.com website and MobileApp experiences. You’ll work across team boundaries to design and develop components as well as performance-optimized backend systems that scale across cars.com 

We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer with 8+ years of aggregate software engineering experience to design and evangelize how we engineer products leveraging state of the art industry best practices.

Why You'll Be Excited About This Role

This opportunity enables you to...

• Drive technical excellence by championing best practices in software design, operational maturity, and engineering quality across teams

• 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. 

• Lead team ceremonies, managing discussions, ensuring follow-up items are noted, and actively suggesting improvements to processes, cadence, or scheduling.

• Act as a key stakeholder in release planning for your team's projects, ensuring detailed release plans and checklists are prepared, and automating, de-risking, and optimizing team release processes.

• Help set team-wide best practices around operational metrics, alerting, and runbooks, and proactively identify potential blockers, knowing when to escalate or conduct timeboxed investigations.

• Set team-wide standards around the on-call process and coach teams on how to improve using a pragmatic, data-driven approach.

• Actively build and maintain working relationships across the enterprise, both within engineering and with cross-functional partners, proactively driving alignment through discussions.

• Lead and be 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. 

• Contribute to the architecture and implementation of server-driven UI strategies, ensuring flexible and dynamic search interfaces.

• Explore and integrate agentic AI technologies to enhance product experience, personalization, and intelligent recommendations across your team's area of responsibility.

We're Excited About You Because You Have …..

• Significant professional software engineering experience (8+ years)

• Extensive experience in front end and backend software engineering experience, including a deep knowledge of JavaScript (and TypeScript), Web Components, and having working familiarity with various web 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.

• Solid understanding of working with back-end technologies and architectural patterns.

• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, influence others, and align multiple teams around technical direction.

• 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).

• Able to observe, instrument, optimize, and operate what you build (we use Datadog)

• Understanding of CI/CD and deployment toolchains; we use CircleCI, Docker, Amazon EKS, Terraform

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Bonus points (not required) ...

• Experience building production applications using a Server Driven UI (SDUI) approach to build across web and mobile clients using GraphQL.

• Some production Elixir experience or knowledge; you've built and deployed Elixir to production

In the spirit of pay transparency, we are excited to share the base salary range for this position. In addition to base salary, some roles are eligible for our bonus and/or equity programs, depending on level and role. Regular full-time positions are eligible for our comprehensive benefits package. If you are hired at Cars Commerce, your final base salary compensation will be determined based on factors such as skills and/or experience. If the salary range is close to what you're seeking, then we encourage you to apply and learn more about the total compensation package for this position.

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

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!

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.
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