Sr. Software Engineer - PHP

Be essential at Cars Commerce

At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challengeand Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.

(This is a remote role. May require onsite interviews)

ABOUT THE ROLE -

Join us in shaping a future of Automotive Commerce. Cars Commerce builds solutions for automotive dealerships, manufacturers, and consumers. Our driving force is to deliver a single platform that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars. Our Websites Engineering team creates the foundational capabilities used across our industry leader; Dealer Inspire platform - enabling speed, consistency, and innovation. 

Our Dealer Inspire platform’s ‘Business Delivery’ Team is embarking on a transformation journey, building innovative services and redefining how we deliver value to our customers. This is an exceptional opportunity to influence the future of our Dealer Inspire platform and drive meaningful change at scale to make an impact within the automotive industry.

Are you passionate about building high-performance, secure, and scalable systems that power critical applications? We’re looking for a talented Sr Software Engineer to join our progressive engineering team. In this role, you’ll improve existing services, troubleshoot complex issues, and design next-generation systems that support our Dealer Inspire platform’s growth.

ABOUT YOU -

As a Senior Software Engineer, you are a results-oriented backend engineer or full-stack developer with a strong track record in building large-scale, resilient software systems using PHP. You understand the value of software architecture, clean code, and engineering best practices. You’ve worked with microservices, cloud infrastructure, and containerized applications — you love to see your code run in production with performance, stability, and security in mind.

You’re familiar with Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools, and you thrive in collaborative, fast-paced environments. Above all, you're passionate about empowering product teams by delivering core capabilities and internal platforms that accelerate innovation.

RESPONSIBILITIES -

• Develop Scalable and Reliable Systems: Design, build, and maintain high-availability services that meet SLAs/SLOs and can handle increasing traffic and complexity.
• Own and Operate Production Systems: Take responsibility for the full lifecycle of the systems you build. Monitor, support, and continuously improve production systems through on-call rotation participation
• Technical System Design & Architecture: Designing and evolving scalable, secure, and maintainable architectures by building, refactoring or rewriting APIs etc for modernization
• Performance & Reliability Engineering: Play a critical role in ensuring our systems are fast, resilient, and scalable to directly impact uptime, latency, and overall platform health
• Infrastructure, Observability and CI/CD: Designing, building, and maintaining the foundational infrastructure that supports our platform. This includes managing scalable cloud environments, building and/or maintaining CI/CD pipelines etc to ensure high system availability through modern observability practices
• Incident Management & Outages: Respond to high-impact incidents and outages, ensuring rapid mitigation to diagnose root causes, restore service, and drive post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
• Improve Developer Experience: Create robust API documentation, system diagrams, and user guides to support internal and external developers in a self-service environment.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Champion testing, automation, and best practices in code reviews, documentation, and deployment strategies.
• Cross Team Collaboration: Work closely with product and program managers, front-end developers, DevOps engineers, and infrastructure teams to ensure technical solutions align with business goals.
• Leadership: Mentor and support junior engineer without the people management responsibilities

QUALIFICATIONS -

• Bachelor’s Degree or above in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer or Backend Developer
• Proficiency in PHP and frameworks such as Symfony or Laravel
• Experience with JavaScript, Node.js, and frameworks like Express and Next.js
• Solid experience with SQL databases, database schema design, and performance optimization
• Strong knowledge of REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and microservices
• Cloud (AWS) Infrastructure and Observability experience.
• Familiarity with HTML5, SASS, and modern JavaScript front-end development
• Hands-on experience with containerization using Docker and orchestration via Kubernete
• Understanding of DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and alerting
• Experience with end-to-end testing frameworks like Cypress or Playwright
• Excellence at debugging complex JavaScript bugs and tracing issues across systems
• Strong communication and collaboration skills; able to work cross-functionally and adapt to evolving priorities
• Comfortable with Agile methodologies and fast-paced development cycles
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotations

OUR TECH STACK -

• PHP (Symfony, Laravel)
• JavaScript / Node.js (Express, Next.js)
• SQL Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
• Docker & Kubernetes
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar
• Observability: DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, or similar
• Testing: Cypress, Playwright, PHPUnit

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up
• Generous PTO
• Refuel - a service based recognition program where employees receive additional paid time away to learn grow and reset
• Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. California Applicants: Click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Applicants. For current employees, please click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Employees.