Principal Software Engineer
$175,800–$219,750 year
Remote · United States
Job Summary
Principal Software Engineer leading Platform Core Services for Identity, Inventory, and Leads in Cars Commerce's unified automotive marketplace stack. Role emphasizes architectural stewardship, end-to-end sovereignty over backend systems and product surfaces, and driving AI-driven modernization (LLM orchestration) to achieve sub-second latency and massive concurrency. Responsibilities include defining service evolution, bridging backend systems with modern UI products, RFC-driven governance, and ensuring operational excellence at scale (Four Nines). The role requires hands-on leadership, experience designing high-concurrency distributed systems, RBAC across the stack, and a pragmatic polyglot approach (TypeScript/Node.js). The posting highlights a remote-first, US-focused hire with base salary range of $175,800–$219,750 plus bonus/equity where applicable, comprehensive benefits, and inability to sponsor visas for US-based applicants.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience
- 12+ years of software engineering experience
- Significant time at Staff or Principal level backend mastery
- Deep expertise in high-concurrency distributed systems
- Frontend system architecture experience (State Management, RBAC across stack, efficient data-fetching)
- Proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js; language-agnostic tool selection
- Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka/MSK)
- Experience with designing sub-second latency systems
- Ability to drive consensus using data, benchmarks, and trade-off analysis
- Knowledge of AI/LLM-driven development workflows and productivity tooling
- Experience in architectural stewardship and SDLC evolution
- Knowledge of observability and developer experience best practices
- Bonus: experience in large-scale or FAANG-like environments
- Strong communication and leadership skills
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