Backend Engineer II - Java/Spring, High-Volume Data

CarGurus LLC; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 112,000 - 141,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity for all employees

Hybrid model

Daily free lunch

New car discount

Meditation and fitness apps

Commuting cost coverage

Job summary

CarGurus is seeking a Software Development Engineer II (Backend) to help dealers close more leads. You’ll work in Java/Spring Boot, enriching each lead, consuming high-volume streams, and powering dealer dashboards.

You’ll own features from design through launch and collaborate with product, design, and other engineers to drive adoption and improve close rates. You’ll work with Kafka, MongoDB, Redis, and RESTful APIs, building scalable services and AI-enabled capabilities to guide the dealer’s

Qualifications

• 2-4 years of hands-on software development experience in a professional setting.
• Proficiency in Java, ideally with Spring Boot.
• Solid working knowledge of MongoDB or another NoSQL datastore, and comfort with SQL.
• Practical understanding of RESTful API design, microservices, and distributed systems, including event streams or message queues (Kafka, SQS, or similar) and caching trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and cloud infrastructure.
• A strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis.
• A habit of writing automated tests, and a sense for which tests a change actually needs.
• Experience or interest in leveraging AI coding tools to accelerate development (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor).
• Nice to have: Python, and hands-on experience with LLM or agent frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph.
• Clear communication, curiosity, and a bias toward shipping, with genuine interest in learning the dealer domain.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship features in the Java and Spring Boot services that enrich every lead and power the insights dealers act on every day.
• Own your work from technical design through testing, code review, and production, with support from the team when you need it.
• Work with high-volume event streams and the data behind them (Kafka, MongoDB, Redis) to keep shopper data fresh and APIs fast.
• Build intelligence features, including LLM-backed ones, that recommend a dealer's next move rather than just handing them data.
• Diagnose and fix production issues across services, share in on-call, and improve the alerting and observability we rely on.
• Partner with product and design to break ambiguous problems into scoped, shippable work, with a real say in what we build and how.
• Help raise the bar on how we test, deploy, and operate the services we own.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

MongoDB

SQL

RESTful API design

Microservices

Distributed systems

AWS

Automated tests

AI coding tools

Python

LangChain

LangGraph

Communication

Tools

Kafka

SQS

Job description

CarGurus is seeking a Software Development Engineer II (Backend) to help dealers close more leads. You’ll work in Java/Spring Boot, enriching each lead, consuming high-volume streams, and powering dealer dashboards.

You’ll own features from design through launch and collaborate with product, design, and other engineers to drive adoption and improve close rates. You’ll work with Kafka, MongoDB, Redis, and RESTful APIs, building scalable services and AI-enabled capabilities to guide the dealer’s