Team Lead, DevX Kubernetes Platform as a Service

CarGurus; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 154,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonuses

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)

Job summary

CarGurus is looking for a Team Lead for their DevX PaaS team in Boston, MA. This role requires leadership over a team of engineers while also engaging technically. Responsibilities include managing team dynamics, owning project deliverables in Kubernetes, and advocating for robust platform solutions.

The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience, deep expertise in Kubernetes and Go programming, and a passion for helping engineers grow. The position offers a competitive salary with additional benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer with team leading experience.
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes/EKS and proficiency in cloud operations.
• Strong programming skills in Go or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Lead operations and project planning for DevX PaaS team.
• Design and operate Kubernetes platform for reliability and security.
• Manage team dynamics and prioritize high-impact work.

Skills

Kubernetes/EKS management

Go programming

Cloud environments

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

CI/CD automation

Metrics/Observability

Security by design

Tools

Terraform

ArgoCD

GitHub workflows

Job description

Role Overview

The DevX PaaS team builds and operates CarGurus' Kubernetes-based developer platform that enables product teams to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. We're a sub‑team within Developer Experience in Engineering Platform, partnering across engineering to remove friction, modernize our stack, and accelerate time‑to‑market.

This is a player‑coach leadership role. As Team Lead, you'll own the day‑to‑day leadership of a small team of engineers — running ceremonies, planning quarterly capacity, growing the people on your team, and serving as the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform — while staying technically hands‑on enough to make meaningful contributions on our most important platform work — autoscaling, agentic automation of cluster maintenance and upgrades, service discovery, and the continued evolution of our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS‑native capabilities. You'll be the connective tissue between our platform's technical direction and the developers who depend on it every day.

Three big bets anchor the team's near‑term direction: keeping Kubernetes healthy and cost‑efficient through autoscaling and increasingly automated maintenance; piloting an AI‑assisted support model for developer questions (starting with PaaS); and standing up service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to simplify how services connect. Everything below ladders up to these themes.

What You'll Do

• Own team operations for DevX PaaS: run 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and quarterly capacity and project planning, and represent PaaS in Engineering Platform planning and prioritization forums.
• Grow the engineers on your team through coaching, feedback, and equitable allocation of high‑impact, growth‑oriented work — including an "epic lead" model where engineers own end‑to‑end delivery of major initiatives.
• Shape the team's quarterly portfolio so that the team's energy is spent on the highest‑leverage work, balancing a heavy load of non‑discretionary platform work (upgrades, migrations, maintenance, on‑call) against modernization and strategic initiatives.
• Be the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform — framing problems, aligning on scope, and making sure downstream teams understand impacts and timelines.

Drive the Platform (Hands‑on)

• Help design, build, and operate the Kubernetes platform on AWS EKS with a focus on reliability, security, and developer ergonomics (multi‑env, multi‑region).
• Guide the team's Controller/Operator and deployment model (e.g., CGService) to provide consistent, self‑service delivery across repositories and environments.
• Lead critical upgrades and rollouts: Kubernetes, Rancher, and routine add‑on upgrades utilizing ArgoCD and HCP Terraform.
• Set the direction for autoscaling across product and EP services — driving automated scale‑down, day‑2 EKS optimizations, and cost/performance wins in partnership with product teams.
• Champion agentic and AI‑assisted workflows for cluster maintenance — automating EKS upgrades, PR generation, and bundled maintenance to reduce manual toil and create predictable, low‑disruption maintenance windows.
• Advance service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to provide a robust, automated way for services to find and communicate with each other, reducing hard‑coded dependencies and improving system resilience.
• Expand our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS‑native capabilities, continuing to shield developers from Kubernetes complexity while modernizing the underlying stack.
• Guide remaining platform modernization, including the tail end of the ingress‑nginx retirement / Gateway API migration, to simplify developer configuration and reduce operational toil.
• Pilot a more scalable, AI‑assisted support model for developer questions — starting with PaaS — by curating documentation, embedding AI into the support flow, and reducing the manual triage burden on the team.
• Raise platform reliability by hardening alerting/runbooks and participating in the team's on‑call rotation with sensible, business‑hours expectations and documented handoffs.

Communicate and Partner

• Represent PaaS in EP‑level forums (all‑hands, capacity planning, leads meetings), translating technical trade‑offs into clear, audience‑appropriate language for both engineers and executive stakeholders.
• Build relationships across DevX, Engineering Platform, and product teams to advocate for the platform work that matters and keep partners aligned and informed.
• Champion a healthy, customer‑centric operating model where platform priorities are visible and traceable to the outcomes our customer teams care about.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer in a professional setting, with some experience leading projects, mentoring engineers, or acting as a tech lead / team lead.
• Deep Kubernetes/EKS experience operating production workloads at scale, with proficiency in containerization and cloud environments.
• Strong Go (or equivalent) systems programming skills; familiarity with controller/operator patterns is a plus.
• AWS fluency across core primitives (networking, IAM, load balancing, storage) and platform guardrails.
• Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub‑based workflows) and CI/CD automation.
• An observability and SRE mindset: metrics, tracing, logging, SLOs, incident response, and post‑incident learning.
• A security‑by‑default bent: policy‑as‑code (e.g., Kyverno), least‑privilege, image/runtime controls.
• People leadership instincts: you enjoy growing engineers, running a calm and predictable team, and making sharp prioritization calls under competing demands.
• Developer empathy and clear communication; you enjoy building paved roads that hundreds of engineers can rely on, and you can tailor your message to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• An enthusiasm for leveraging AI to accelerate both your team's work and how the platform enables engineering.

Compensation

Position Pay Range: $154,000—$193,000 USD. This annual base salary forms part of a comprehensive Total Rewards Package. In addition to benefits, the role may qualify for discretionary bonuses/incentives and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

EEO Statement

We welcome all. CarGurus strives to be a place where people can bring the ultimate expression of themselves and their potential—starting with our hiring process. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation. We foster an inclusive environment that values people for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. That’s why we hope you’ll apply even if you don’t check every box listed in the job description. We also encourage you to tell your recruiter if you require accommodations to participate in our hiring process due to a disability so we can provide the appropriate support. We want to know what only you can bring to CarGurus.