Staff Software Engineer
Staff backend engineer on Cars Commerce's Websites Engineering team, modernizing the Dealer Inspire platform's backend services and tooling: defining scalable, API-based architectures (microservices, event-driven) on AWS, mentoring engineers, and driving documentation and developer experience. Core stack includes Node, AWS services, Postgres/DynamoDB, Redis, Kafka, and observability tooling.
- Compensation
- $154.2K–$192.8K / yr
- Location
- Chicago, United States
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
- 10+ years of backend software development experience with large-scale, highly available systems, microservices, APIs, and event-driven systems
- 3+ years architecting and building cloud-native solutions on AWS (EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, Lambda), including deploying, monitoring, and scaling in production
- Strong system design skills with ability to evaluate trade-offs, drive consensus, and document design decisions
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills for technical and non-technical audiences
- Proven experience mentoring engineers and supporting their growth in architecture and leadership
- Experience modernizing legacy systems and upgrading legacy technology stacks
- Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and gRPC
- In-depth knowledge of relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB) data stores, caching (Redis), and messaging systems (Kafka) at scale
- Experience building observability into systems using tools like DataDog or OpenTelemetry
- Understanding of application security principles: secure API design, encryption, OAuth2, JWT, role-based access control
- Familiarity with DevSecOps practices: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, security integration
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation with incident resolution and postmortems
Nice to have
- Experience with the Node ecosystem
Full description
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 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. We are proud to be named one of Built In's 2026 Best Places to Work in Chicago and across the U.S. Ready to make your mark? Join a team that's driving real change in the automotive industry.
Exciting backend Staff Engineer role focused on platform modernization
About the Role [Remote and must be located in Chicago area. 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. As a Staff Software Engineer on our Websites Engineering Team, you will help revitalize our backend services and tooling across our platform with a comprehensive technical strategy to simplify and build scalable systems. 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.
You’ll work across team boundaries to design and develop components as well as performance-optimized back-end systems that scale across Dealer Inspire - Websites Engineering Team.