Senior Manager, Application Systems

About the role

The Senior Technology Manager at CarMax helps bring disruptive innovation to life. They foster a solution driven mindset for their teams and partner with stakeholders to provide innovative solutions that deliver CarMax's strategic mission and plans. This Senior Manager grows people, creates teams that solve problems for our Associates and customers and communicates priorities to stakeholders. The empowered teams of engineers they lead follow the Agile framework and leverage best in class technology to solve complex business problems. With these teams of inspired associates, if you have a good idea, this is the place to be.

Responsibilities

• Partner with business areas to provide technology solutions and services that help deliver CarMax's strategic mission and objectives.
• Direct and manage the planning, software development, implementation, administration and maintenance for a large suite of application systems and solutions that focus on upper funnel acquisition, customer activation, and engagement at CarMax.
• Develop long- and short-term technology solutions that address business goals and deliver improved profitability, efficiency and an unrivaled customer experience.
• Guide teams through execution, attract, recruit, retain and coach a strong team of skilled and engaged associates aligned to the overall mission, and lead engineers through the shift to AI-assisted and agentic development.
• Continue to grow one’s knowledge base and stay current with industry trends while also formulating a strategic technology plan for each business area based on in-depth understanding of the current business needs and their future direction.
• Expand the reach of the CarMax brand through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), so customers find us across both traditional search and AI-driven answer experiences.
• Help lead the strategy for content management and customer personalization, the systems and content that power how we acquire, engage, and convert shoppers.
• Partner deeply with Design to unlock a modern design-system-to-code pipeline, and build the platform foundations for personalization across the acquisition, search, and discovery experiences.
• Lead the team through the next wave of integration change, such as emerging protocols like MCP, agent-to-agent interoperability, and an evolving API and data surface that lets CarMax systems plug into the broader AI ecosystem.
• Operate AI-powered discovery responsibly and at scale, set the bar for evals, guardrails, and bias and hallucination monitoring, while managing the latency, reliability, and cost realities of running SLMs and LLMs in the customer path.
• Ensure system health, compliance, and secure, efficient operations, drive a rigorous experimentation and measurement culture in partnership with Data and Analytics, and champion an accessible, high-performance discovery experience.

Requirements

• Strategic planning and results focus
• Identify the appropriate goals for the teams
• Prioritize business and technology objectives to deliver a holistic approach to omnichannel solutions that includes ROI, time to market, scalability as well as alternative recommendations
• Communication
• Partner with business stakeholders, peer groups, the technology leadership team, and key associates
• Communicate the vision and strategy to executive leadership, peers, and teams to support the strategic direction
• Guide teams through execution
• Team Leadership and Development
• Attract, recruit, retain and coach a strong team of skilled and engaged associates aligned to the overall mission
• Create clear role expectations and develop associates to reach their full potential, understand their goals and needs, partner in their development, provide advice, feedback, training and advocacy
• Lead engineers through the shift to AI-assisted and agentic development, set the bar for how the team adopts AI tooling, agentic workflows, and new ways of building software at scale
• Technology
• Continue to grow one’s knowledge base and stay current with industry trends while also formulating a strategic technology plan for each business area based on in-depth understanding of the current business needs and their future direction
• Partner on customer acquisition strategy and help the business navigate what acquisition looks like as Answer Engines and generative discovery reshape the funnel
• Expand the reach of the CarMax brand through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), so customers find us across both traditional search and AI-driven answer experiences
• Help lead the strategy for content management and customer personalization, the systems and content that power how we acquire, engage, and convert shoppers
• Partner deeply with Design to unlock a modern design-system-to-code pipeline, and build the platform foundations for personalization across the acquisition, search, and discovery experiences
• Lead the team through the next wave of integration change, such as emerging protocols like MCP, agent-to-agent interoperability, and an evolving API and data surface that lets CarMax systems plug into the broader AI ecosystem
• Operate AI-powered discovery responsibly and at scale, set the bar for evals, guardrails, and bias and hallucination monitoring, while managing the latency, reliability, and cost realities of running SLMs and LLMs in the customer path
• Ensure system health, compliance, and secure, efficient operations
• Drive a rigorous experimentation and measurement culture in partnership with Data and Analytics, such as A/B testing, causal measurement, and discovery-quality metrics (relevance, conversion, abandonment) that turn intuition into evidence
• Champion an accessible, high-performance discovery experience, accountable for accessibility (WCAG) and Core Web Vitals as both a customer obligation and a driver of SEO and conversion
• Design for customers and bots as distinct personas, the human shopper and the LLM crawler, AI agent, or retrieval pipeline through common experiences leveraging distinct surfaces, content shapes, and signals

Qualifications

• Passionate about enterprise software, commerce, content, and customer journeys
• Persuasive and effective communicator; able to explain complex or intangible concepts to stakeholders at all levels, including large audiences and executives
• Good listener; weighs input from multiple perspectives when forming opinions and recommendations
• Collaborative and team-oriented
• Experience gaining consensus among a large, diverse group of stakeholders, and ensuring rapid decisions are made
• Experience managing, training and mentoring others in enterprise technology software development and implementation best practices
• Innovative and entrepreneurial; thrives in a fast-paced environment
• Analytical; solves problems at root cause and prioritizes effectively
• Entrepreneurial drive and spirit; enjoys working in a fast-paced environment
• Handles constructive criticism with ease
• Adapts easily and efficiently to organizational and strategic change
• Education and Experience:
• BS/BA degree - Technology related, preferred
• 7+ years of experience in enterprise-class technology with 5+ years of application systems development and implementation
• 3+ years of experience managing direct reports
• 3+ years of experience leading transformative and evolutionary software projects
• 3+ years of experience in eCommerce user journeys, customer activation and engagement, or customer shopping funnel
• Experience in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing
• Experience building with generative or agentic AI, LLM-based products, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or AI-driven discovery and personalization