Senior Data Engineer

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 Challenge and 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. We are proud to be named one of Built In's 2026 Best Places to Work in Chicago and across the U.S. Ready to make your mark? Join a team that's driving real change in the automotive industry.

About the Role -

[Remote and must be located in the Chicago area. May require onsite interviews]

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 Data and AI Platform team is embarking on a transformational journey, building innovative and integrated services that redefine how we deliver value to our customers and consumers alike. This is a rare opportunity to join a data-first company at a genuine inflection point — with strong leadership, a clear vision, and an enormous amount of meaningful work to be done. For a data professional who wants to build, create, and make a real impact — this is the place and the moment.

About You -

As a Senior Data Engineer on our Data Platform Engineering Team, you will help revitalize our Data Services and tooling across our platform with a comprehensive technical strategy to simplify and build scalable systems. This is an exceptional opportunity to shape the future of our platforms and drive meaningful change at scale, making a lasting impact within the automotive industry.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you own a domain of our data platform end to end — not just implementing pipelines, but designing them and making the call on ambiguous, harder problems with little hand-holding. You set the quality bar for your area: data contracts with upstream producers, automated testing and anomaly detection, and monitoring that catches issues before the business does.

You'll build and tune production-grade pipelines using PySpark and advanced SQL, and design the dimensional models and medallion-style (bronze/silver/gold) data layers that Data Science, BI, and Analytics teams build on top of. You're also accountable for the performance and reliability of the warehouse assets your domain produces, including query tuning and cost-aware design in Redshift.

This role is also where we're pushing the platform forward: using Al-assisted development as a core part of how the team builds and ships, and helping lay the groundwork for a knowledge graph that connects our core entities and metrics across the business.

Why You'll Be Excited About This Role

This opportunity enables you to...

• Design, build, and maintain robust production pipelines and reusable data assets for analytics, Data Science, and BI, using PySpark and SQL-based transformation patterns.

• Own data quality and reliability for your domain through data contracts with upstream producers, automated data quality checks, and anomaly detection.

• Tune PySpark jobs and pipeline performance for runtime, memory, partitioning, and compute cost at production scale.

• Design and maintain dimensional models and medallion-style (bronze/silver/gold) data layering, producing reusable, well-documented assets for Data Science and BI teams.

• Optimize Redshift performance; query tuning, Spectrum external tables, Glue Data Catalog, and materialized views for the warehouse assets your domain owns.

• Own warehouse pipeline SLAs, freshness monitoring, and incident response for your domain; participate in on-call.

• Break down ambiguous business problems and resolve them, mapping day-to-day work to broader increment goals.

• Drive adoption of Al-assisted development practices across the team - using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Amazon Q to accelerate pipeline development, testing, and documentation, not just code completion.

• Partner directly with stakeholders on requirements and prioritization; establish and document engineering standards for your area.

• Review code and ensure the quality of what the team ships

• Mentor and coach more junior engineers, leveling up their technical judgment and ownership over time.

We're Excited About You Because…

• 5+ years building and maintaining production data pipelines, with demonstrated ownership of a domain, a significant migration, or an architecture decision.

• Proficient in PySpark and Python, including performance tuning for runtime, memory, and cost.

• Advanced SQL for complex data manipulation, joins, aggregation, and window functions.

• Solid cloud experience; AWS strongly preferred.

• Strong data modeling skills; dimensional design and grain, and medallion-style layering

• Delta Lake/Iceberg fluency — table format internals, compaction, vacuuming, and schema evolution.

• Experience with Redshift — query optimization, Spectrum external tables, Glue Data Catalog, and materialized views.

• Experience establishing data contracts and schema validation with upstream producers, and working with observability tooling (e.g., Great Expectations, Metaplane, Monte Carlo, or similar).

• Proficient with Airflow (or similar orchestration)

• API development for consuming and serving data or model outputs.

• Comfort with infrastructure-as-code and mature CI/CD practices (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins).

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or Amazon Q).

• Interest in or experience with knowledge graphs and graph-based data modeling — you'll help design and build out this capability as a core part of our semantic layer and catalog work.

• Demonstrates ability to mentor without being the go-to answer key — you teach people how to reason through a problem rather than just handing them the solution.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus:

• Experience with streaming/CDC patterns (Kafka, MSK, or Flink).

• Exposure to data cataloging and lineage tools (Atlan or similar).

• Experience in a high-availability, distributed environment.

• AWS certifications.

In the spirit of pay transparency, we are excited to share the base salary range for this position. In addition to base salary, some roles are eligible for our bonus and/or equity programs, depending on level and role. Regular full-time positions are eligible for our comprehensive benefits package. If you are hired at Cars Commerce, your final base salary compensation will be determined based on factors such as skills and/or experience. If the salary range is close to what you're seeking, then we encourage you to apply and learn more about the total compensation package for this position.

Salary Range

$118,600.00-148,250.00

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans

• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up

• Generous PTO

• Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!

For US-based Positions: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. Please note that we are unable to sponsor employment visas at this time.

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. Applicants: Click here to review our Privacy Policy for Applicants. For current employees, please click here to review our California Privacy Policy for Employees.