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, 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.

About the Role

Cars Commerce is unifying the car-buying journey on a single, data-driven platform, and Platform Core Services Team delivers the identity, inventory, lead-delivery, and data-streaming capabilities that power every brand in our portfolio.

Join Us in shaping the future of Automotive Commerce. Our Platform Core Services team is embarking on a transformative journey, building innovative services that will redefine the way we deliver value. As an Software Engineering Manager you will lead a high-impact team within the Leads and Lead Delivery domain at Cars Commerce. An exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our platform and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact on the industry

As an Software Engineering Manager you will guide a cross-functional team that owns a mission-critical, API-first service built in Elixir/Phoenix and deployed on AWS EKS. Working side-by-side with a dedicated Product Manager, you’ll translate quarterly goals into three-sprint increments, keep the backlog healthy and transparent in Jira, and use DORA and developer productivity metrics to drive predictable, high-quality delivery. You’ll champion observability, security, and on-call health, act as incident commander for your service, and contribute to the broader Platform Core Services architecture by sharing best practices and participating in design reviews.

About You

You are a hands-on, empathetic leader who balances people, process, and product. Perhaps you’ve shipped services that handle hundreds—or even thousands—of requests per second, mentored mid-level engineers into senior contributors, or used sprint data to improve velocity without sacrificing reliability. You foster psychological safety, welcome diverse viewpoints, and believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere. Even if Elixir or automotive retail is new to you, your curiosity, growth mindset, and commitment to inclusive leadership matter more than a perfect résumé match—so if this mission excites you, we encourage you to apply.

Responsibilities

• Team-level delivery ownership: Lead a cross-functional team of 6-10 engineers that owns a high-throughput, API-first service; keep at least three upcoming sprints groomed in Jira, set clear sprint goals, and model disciplined velocity tracking and burndown hygiene.

• Quarterly planning & prioritization: Partner with your Product Manager to translate OKRs into three-sprint increments, balancing new features, technical debt, and reliability investments while communicating trade-offs to stakeholders.

• Customer focus: Collaborate with engineering teams across Cars Commerce products (Cars.com, Dealer Inspire, AccuTrade, etc.) to develop strong partnerships, thus enabling the success of major initiatives by building new capabilities into our API services.

• People development: Run regular 1-1s, craft individual growth plans, deliver timely feedback, and mentor engineers toward senior-level ownership, fostering an inclusive, psychologically safe culture.

• Reliability & security stewardship: Own SLOs, on-call rotations, incident command, and post-mortem learning; ensure vulnerability-remediation SLAs and secure-by-design practices are embedded in the backlog.

• Metrics-driven improvement: Use DORA, developer productivity, and Jira data to surface bottlenecks, lead retrospectives, and run continuous-improvement experiments that raise throughput without sacrificing quality.

• Cross-team collaboration: Coordinate APIs and dependencies with adjacent Core Services teams, participate in architecture reviews, and represent your service’s roadmap and risks in program reviews.

• Hiring & onboarding: Work with Talent Acquisition to source a diverse pipeline, conduct structured interviews, and onboard new engineers into our observability-first, blameless culture.

Qualifications

• Experience: 7+ years in software engineering, including 2–3 years in an Engineering Manager role; proven success shipping and operating production services that handle hundreds to low-thousands of requests per second.

• Technical depth: Solid background in cloud-native architectures (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), REST or event-driven systems, relational/NoSQL data stores, and modern observability stacks such as Datadog.

• Delivery mastery: Comfortable running two-week sprints, maintaining healthy backlogs, and leveraging Jira, DORA, and developer productivity metrics to forecast capacity and improve team performance.

• Reliability & security mindset: Hands-on experience defining SLOs, leading incident response, and integrating CI/CD and vulnerability remediation into everyday development.

• People leadership: Demonstrated ability to coach engineers at all levels, resolve conflict, and build inclusive, high-trust and high-performance team cultures aligned with Cars Commerce values.

• Product partnership: Skilled at translating technical decisions into business impact and collaborating with Product and Design to reach outcome-focused decisions.

• Communication excellence: Clear, concise communicator who adapts message and medium for engineers, cross-functional peers, and executives alike.

• Bonus points: Experience with Elixir/Phoenix or automotive-retail data.

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!

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.