Remote Staff Backend Engineer — Platform Modernization

Cars Commerce Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 154,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Dental & Vision

New Hire Home Office Stipend

Generous PTO

Holidays and Volunteer Day

Job summary

Cars Commerce is seeking a Backend Staff Software Engineer to revitalize backend services and tooling across the Dealer Inspire Websites Engineering Team. You will design scalable, API-driven back-end systems, mentor engineers, and drive a unified architectural strategy that supports the Cars Commerce platform and its integrations.

You should bring 10+ years in backend development, strong experience with AWS, microservices, REST/GraphQL/gRPC, and a passion for high-quality, observable systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of backend software development with a focus on large-scale, available systems including microservices, APIs and event-driven architectures.
• 3+ years architecting cloud-native solutions on AWS (EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, Lambda) and deploying in production.
• Experience with Node ecosystem and distributed systems.
• Strong system design, documentation, and leadership.
• Experience with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and gRPC.
• Knowledge of relational (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB) data stores, caching (Redis), and Kafka.
• Observability with DataDog or OpenTelemetry.
• Secure API design, data encryption, OAuth2/JWT, and RBAC.
• DevSecOps practices, CI/CD, IaC, and security integration.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotation.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive reusable, scalable back-end architectures across the Cars Commerce platform and integrations.
• Develop high-performance, API-based backend services that meet SLOs and scale with demand.
• Promote technical excellence and best practices across the team.
• Collaborate with engineering, design, and product partners to align on back-end strategies and standards.
• Mentor engineers and influence department-wide practices.
• Document components and improve developer experience.
• Contribute full-stack work when needed to support UI integrations.

Skills

Backend development

Microservices

APIs (REST/GraphQL/gRPC)

AWS

Node ecosystem

System design

Security (OAuth2/JWT)

CI/CD / DevSecOps

On-call rotation

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

AWS services (EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, Lambda)

Kubernetes

DataDog/OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Job description

Cars Commerce is seeking a Backend Staff Software Engineer to revitalize backend services and tooling across the Dealer Inspire Websites Engineering Team. You will design scalable, API-driven back-end systems, mentor engineers, and drive a unified architectural strategy that supports the Cars Commerce platform and its integrations.

You should bring 10+ years in backend development, strong experience with AWS, microservices, REST/GraphQL/gRPC, and a passion for high-quality, observable systems.