Sr. Software Engineer (AI First)

About the role

OPENLANE is a technology company building a digital marketplace for used vehicles, leveraging data and AI to help customers buy and sell smarter. They are hiring AI-first Sr. Software Engineers to build, evolve, and scale U.S. marketplace platforms, using AI as a first‑class development tool while maintaining engineering ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable services that power U.S. marketplace workflows such as Buy Now, 45M, Simulcast, and DealerBlock
• Develop APIs and backend services on the modern, cloud‑native, AI‑enabled platform
• Embed AI‑driven capabilities into marketplace features including pricing logic, negotiation flows, and workflow automation
• Use AI tools to accelerate coding, testing, debugging, and documentation while applying strong engineering judgment
• Partner with Product to translate business needs into durable, scalable technical solutions
• Participate in on‑call rotations and support live production systems
• Improve system reliability, performance, security, and observability
• Contribute to technical direction, engineering standards, and long‑term platform evolution
• AI‑assisted coding and refactoring
• AI‑generated test coverage and validation
• AI‑supported debugging and root‑cause analysis
• AI‑assisted documentation and knowledge sharing
• Applying AI tools to reduce repetitive work and increase engineering leverage

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and supporting production software systems
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Ability to own features and systems end‑to‑end
• Actively uses AI development tools (code copilots, AI debuggers, test generators)
• Curious about applying AI to real customer and business problems
• Able to critically evaluate AI outputs instead of blindly accepting them
• Comfortable learning and adapting in a fast‑changing tool landscape

Skills

• Backend development (Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, .NET, Ruby, or similar)
• Strong understanding of APIs, distributed systems, and cloud‑native architecture
• Comfort working in modern CI/CD environments
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and incident response
• Frontend experience (React, TypeScript) is a plus
• AWS or similar cloud platforms
• Microservices and event‑driven architectures
• SQL and data‑driven applications
• Marketplace, e‑commerce, or high‑volume transaction systems
• Reliability engineering or SRE experience
• Experience modernizing or migrating legacy systems