Staff Backend Engineer — Platform Modernization (Remote)

Cars.com LLC; Illinois; Hybrid; USD 154,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental & Vision

Home office stipend

Generous PTO

Holidays and Volunteer Day

Job summary

Cars Commerce is building a single platform to simplify car buying and selling for dealers, manufacturers, and consumers. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Websites Engineering Team, you will revitalize backend services, design scalable systems, and drive API-led solutions across RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC interfaces.

You will mentor engineers, champion DevSecOps practices, and shape architectural standards while working in a remote-first environment based in Chicago with on-site interviews.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 10+ years of backend software development experience.
• 3+ years building cloud-native solutions on AWS.
• Experience with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and gRPC.
• Strong knowledge of relational and NoSQL data stores.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive reusable, scalable back-end architectures across the Cars Commerce platform.
• Develop high-performance API-based services meeting SLAs and scale with demand.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with cross-team partners on back-end strategies and standards.
• Contribute to documentation and developer experience.

Skills

Backend design

System design

RESTful APIs

GraphQL

gRPC

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Security best practices

Observability

Mentorship

On-call readiness

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Node.js ecosystem

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

REST, GraphQL, gRPC

PostgreSQL/MySQL

DynamoDB/MongoDB

Redis

Kafka

DataDog/OpenTelemetry

OAuth2/JWT

CI/CD / DevSecOps

Kubernetes (EKS)

Terraform / IaC

Job description

Cars Commerce is building a single platform to simplify car buying and selling for dealers, manufacturers, and consumers. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Websites Engineering Team, you will revitalize backend services, design scalable systems, and drive API-led solutions across RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC interfaces.

You will mentor engineers, champion DevSecOps practices, and shape architectural standards while working in a remote-first environment based in Chicago with on-site interviews.