Staff Backend Engineer: Platform Modernization (Remote)

Cars Commerce; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 154,200 - 192,750; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental & Vision

Home office stipend

Generous PTO

Holidays & Volunteer Day

Job summary

Cars Commerce is seeking a Backend Staff Software Engineer to join the Websites Engineering Team as part of platform modernization. You will revitalize backend services, design scalable API-driven systems, and mentor engineers while collaborating with product and design partners.

You will lead backend architecture, promote engineering quality, and contribute to full-stack efforts when needed. This role offers remote work with Chicago-area presence and on-site interviews.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend software development with scalable systems.
• 3+ years architecting cloud-native solutions on AWS (EKS, RDS, MSK, S3, Lambda).
• Experience with Node ecosystem or willingness to learn.
• Strong system design, leadership, and mentoring abilities.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems and building REST/GraphQL/gRPC APIs.
• Knowledge of relational and NoSQL data stores and caching/messaging systems.
• Experience building observability into systems (DataDog/OpenTelemetry).
• Security principles (OAuth2, JWT) and DevSecOps practices.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotations.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive reusable, scalable backend architectures across the Cars Commerce platform.
• Design and develop high-performance API-based services meeting SLIs/SLOs.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align backend strategies and standards.
• Contribute to documentation and developer experience; enable full-stack collaboration when needed.
• Drive maintenance and modernization of backend components across systems.

Skills

Backend architecture

Cloud-native

Distributed systems

REST/GraphQL/gRPC

Node ecosystem

Security (OAuth2/JWT)

Observability (DataDog/OpenTelemetry)

Data stores (SQL/NoSQL)

On-call readiness

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Kafka

Redis

DataDog/OpenTelemetry

Job description

Cars Commerce is seeking a Backend Staff Software Engineer to join the Websites Engineering Team as part of platform modernization. You will revitalize backend services, design scalable API-driven systems, and mentor engineers while collaborating with product and design partners.

You will lead backend architecture, promote engineering quality, and contribute to full-stack efforts when needed. This role offers remote work with Chicago-area presence and on-site interviews.