Senior Principal Software Development Engineer, Consumer Engineering

About Us

At CarGurus (NASDAQ: CARG), our mission is to give people the power to reach their destination. We started as a small team of developers determined to bring trust and transparency to car shopping. Since then, our history of innovation and go-to-market acceleration has driven industry-leading growth. We’re the largest and fastest-growing automotive marketplace, profitable for over 15 years.

The market is evolving, and so are we, moving the entire automotive journey online—from selling an old car to financing, purchasing, and delivering a new one. Tens of millions of consumers visit CarGurus.com each month, and ~30,000 dealerships use our products. Our people-first culture fosters kindness, collaboration, and innovation, empowering employees with tools to fuel their career growth.

About the Role

CarGurus is hiring a software engineer in our Consumer Commerce department, the group responsible for our highest-trafficked pages and products. Our mission is to deliver comprehensive, accurate, and engaging vehicle information, fostering trust and driving informed, high-intent consumer decisions while upholding CarGurus’ standards for innovation, user-centricity, and technical excellence.

In this role, you’ll contribute to high-visibility parts of our site, introduce AI to our consumer experiences, and collaborate closely with Product, UX, and Analytics teams. This is a fast-moving, impact-oriented environment where you will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive high-visibility AI initiatives from concept to production at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy consumer-facing experiences end-to-end to 45 million monthly visitors, from the data and model layer through to the user-facing product, being hands-on and actively participating in implementation.
• Serve as a go-to AI expert and advisor for all Consumer AI projects, providing technical guidance on architecture, design, and implementation choices.
• Guide platform and infrastructure decisions underpinning AI deployments, including storage, memory, request handling, load management, evaluation pipelines, observability, and analytics.
• Evaluate the broader AI framework and tooling landscape, independent of any single language or ecosystem, and guide teams toward the right approach for a given problem; develop proof-of-concepts to validate AI approaches and explain trade-offs.
• Build and operate systems using LangChain, LangGraph, and Langfuse in Python to develop, orchestrate, and evaluate agentic and LLM-based applications in production.
• Drive the department's adoption of fully agentic programming, defining the patterns, tooling, and best practices engineers follow when building agentic systems.
• Partner with engineering leadership, product, and data teams to shape phased platform guidelines and roadmaps for consumer initiatives.
• Mentor engineers across teams on system design, evaluation methodology, and operational best practices.
• Conduct workshops and produce documentation on AI development, deployment, monitoring, and support practices across multiple teams.
• Document architectural decisions in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and share findings and best practices across teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience architecting resilient, scalable systems and leading technical direction across multiple teams, with extensive experience designing, implementing, and deploying consumer-facing AI experiences in production.
• Hands-on experience with LangChain, LangGraph, and LangFuse in Python and with the platform and infrastructure layers of AI systems, including storage, memory, load management, evaluations, and observability.
• Broad knowledge of the AI framework and tooling landscape beyond Python, with the ability to evaluate and recommend approaches independent of language or ecosystem.
• Hands-on full-stack experience building well-structured, performant applications across frontend, backend, and platform/infrastructure layers for production-grade systems, including experience building APIs and REST services in Java and UX applications in React (preferred).
• Strong communicator with a collaborative spirit who can influence technical direction across multiple teams and disciplines.
• Experience working within the AWS ecosystem (a plus).
• Experience with agentic programming and multi-agent workflows, including guiding teams through adoption of these approaches.
• Experience defining engineering patterns and standards that others adopt, and mentoring engineers on architecture and coding practices.

Pay

The expected annual base salary range for this position is $191,000—$239,000 USD. Individual pay is determined by work location and factors such as job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. This role may qualify for discretionary bonuses/incentives and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Benefits

• Best-in-class benefits and compensation, including equity for all employees, both at hire and as they grow.
• Career development and corporate giving programs, employee resource groups (ERGs), and communities to build connections and make an impact.
• Flexible hybrid model and robust time-off policies to encourage work-life balance and well-being.
• Daily free lunch, new car discount, meditation and fitness apps, commuting cost coverage, and other perks.