Sr. Software Engineer - Front End

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.

Why us?

At Cars Commerce, we’re all about driving the perfect match. Whether it’s helping shoppers find their dream car, empowering dealerships or OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacture) to connect with the right buyers, or guiding job seekers to the next big opportunity—our mission starts with people and ends with powerful results. We’re proud to be the tech engine behind leading brands like Cars.com, Dealer Inspire, and AccuTrade, transforming how the world buys and sells cars.

We thrive on openness, innovation, collaboration, and the freedom to try bold software engineering ideas. At our core, we’re a team of builders, problem-solvers, and lifelong learners—focused on making meaningful impact at scale. If this aligns with you, let's explore!

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. By joining our team you will be in the driver’s seat as we build novel solutions that support frictionless experiences for our users throughout the automotive ecosystem, and across the Cars.com website and MobileApp experiences. 

Why now? 

 Our Cars.com Marketplace Ad Media team is growing and taking an invigorated approach to delighting our customers with sophisticated ad experiences. This is an exciting opportunity for a skilled engineer who has experience in the media and advertising domain, and is passionate about delighting customers with intuitive and reliable user experiences. 

As a Senior Software Engineer you will contribute to how we design and integrate ad units across our media network, collaborate with ad operations teams to ensure correct targeting and responsive rendering, build modern front-end interfaces for the systems you build, and ensure consistent customer experiences across web and mobile clients via the APIs you design and implement. In this role, you will not only work across the application stack. You will also work closely with product and design partners, mentor other engineers, and help shape the Marketplace team culture .

What You’ll Do:

• Work across multi-disciplined product teams and business stakeholders to influence decisions, and deliver new features as well as platform enhancements

• Design, write, and maintain high quality, scalable, efficient software; our primary stack is built in Elixir on the Phoenix framework and and runs in AWS

• Deliver elegant and modern user interfaces and experiences 

• Influence and drive engineering team culture through Pull Request contributions and reviews, project and team retrospectives, and identifying opportunities to improve processes

• Participate in an on-call rotation to support platform health, and drive best practices and improvements to make the Cars Commerce products more resilient and easier to maintain

• Develop, maintain, and evangelize engineering best practices

• Contribute to clear documentation and testing tools in support of our platform

• Integrate and optimize ad units such as banners and native formats, ensuring seamless UI experiences and adherence to industry standards

• Collaborate with Ad Ops to test, validate, and troubleshoot ad delivery across platforms and devices

What You’ll Bring:

• Significant professional software engineering experience (5+ years)

• Expertise in front-end programing languages: Javascript, TypeScript, and CSS

• Built and shipped multiple products, applications, or systems to production

• 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

• Experience developing advertising features or media integrations in line with IAB standards

• Ability to build responsive, high-performance front-end experiences for media-heavy platforms

Bonus:

• Experience delivering production applications using a server-driven UI (SDUI) implementation approach

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

• Familiarity with how the BEAM and OTP work, and Elixir libraries Oban, Broadway, Absinthe

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.