Senior Software Engineering Manager

Role Description

Cars Commerce is unifying the car-buying journey on a new, data-driven platform, and Core Services supplies the identity, inventory, lead-delivery and data-streaming capabilities on which every brand in our portfolio relies. An exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our platforms and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact on the industry.

As a Senior Software Engineering Manager for the Inventory Services Team, you’ll:

• Guide autonomous teams that own several high-throughput, API-first services built in Elixir/Phoenix and deployed on AWS EKS.
• Work closely with Product leadership to turn six- to twelve-month business goals into an incremental, measurable roadmap.
• Champion sound engineering practices around observability, security and on-call health.
• Serve as incident commander and steward of production reliability for your domain.
• Influence platform architecture and shape cross-domain integrations that unlock new revenue streams.
• Help set the technical direction for the wider organization.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with 5+ years leading engineers.
• Proven track record shipping and operating business-critical backend services at scale.
• Strong background in cloud-native architectures (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), event-driven and API-driven systems.
• Skilled at coaching senior/staff engineers, giving constructive feedback, resolving conflict, and fostering an inclusive, high-trust culture aligned with company values.
• Comfortable co-authoring OKRs, making scope/risk trade-offs, and communicating decisions to executives and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Familiar with incident management best practices, observability stacks (DataDog), vulnerability remediation, and DevSecOps pipelines.
• Able to tailor technical and non-technical narratives to engineers, product managers, and executives alike.

Requirements

• Demonstrated ability to plan increments, forecast capacity, and use Jira, DORA, and DX metrics to drive predictable outcomes and continuous improvement.
• Experience with Elixir/Phoenix, automotive-retail data pipelines, or leading platform modernization initiatives is a bonus.

Benefits

• 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

Company Description

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.

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.

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.