Principal Software Engineer

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, 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 Challenge and 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.

Your role:

If you’re an experienced frontend engineer looking for a Principal role with a 100% remote team, you’ve come to the right place!

Cars.com helps tens of millions of people like you and me find their perfect car match each year. We’re looking for a Principal user experience engineer with 10+ years of aggregate software engineering experience to architect and evangelize how we build our frontend web applications.

This role has a high degree of agency, autonomy, and ambiguity. You’ll work with our platform and feature teams to determine technical needs and constraints to guide our frontend engineering strategies and practices. You’ll 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. You’ll reconcile competing demands, constraints, and requirements across stakeholders in order to devise technical solutions that move us forward effectively and efficiently. Once you’ve worked with the teams to arrive at a technical solution, you’ll work to 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.

In short, you’ll be a 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. You’ll educate and guide across all levels of the organization, and your impact will be felt across the entire enterprise. You’ll be a critical part of how a billion-dollar publicly-traded company runs its technical strategy, and your decisions will impact millions of users.

Our stack:

• Elixir, LiveView, Web Components, Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, CircleCI, GitHub, AWS, Datadog

You bring:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, predominantly focused on frontend development 
• 5+ years of experience architecting and building frontend web applications for high-traffic, large-scale web applications
• Deep expertise in modern frontend technologies and best practices (e.g. Web Components, Design Systems)
• You understand the complexities of working with modern frontend technologies, and enjoy working through them to share lessons learned with fellow engineers
• 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
• 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

In the spirit of pay transparency, we are excited to share the base salary range for this position which is not inclusive of bonuses, benefits or other forms of compensation that the position may be eligible for. 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.

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
• 401(k) with Company Match + Immediate Vesting
• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• 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!

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. California Applicants: Click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Applicants. For current employees, please click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Employees.