Sr Lead Software Engineer

Company

Cox Automotive - USA

Engineering / Product Development

Sr Lead Software Engineer

Sr Manager - Non People LeaderHybrid - Ability to work remotely part of the week

Yes, 5% of the time

Day

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $148,500.00 - $247,500.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

Sr Lead Software Engineer - Xtime

Leads the design, development, and evolution of secure, scalable software and cloud infrastructure supporting the Xtime Catalog & Quoting (SPI ↔ SQS) product family — the pricing nervous system of the Xtime fixed-operations platform. Works cross-functionally to understand business requirements, architecture, and technology direction, evaluate alternative approaches, and ensure software and systems are designed accordingly.

Operates across the XMM family of services (Service Pricing Integration — Catalog) and the Service Quoting Service (SQS) family — a Java / Spring Boot stack on AWS EKS with Oracle (legacy) and Aurora-style RDS persistence, S3 cache, Parquet conversion for high-throughput pricing lookups, and Terraform / Terragrunt-managed infrastructure. Incorporates modern concepts and practices to facilitate system functionality, scalability, resilience, and security, as well as ease-of-use (developer and user experience). Applies agile and spec-driven development principles with a focus on delivering business value, collaboration, continuous improvement, and sustainability, in line with the Xtime Engineering Constitution.

Primary Duties / Key Responsibilities

• Leverages subject-matter expertise to lead the design and development of complex, technically challenging efforts across major program and product areas.
• Defines architectural standards, tools, and methodologies to ensure technical consistency, scalability, and quality across the company's functional applications.
• Identifies, evaluates, and applies new technologies to improve systems overall.
• Collaborates with senior members of development and functional departments to share knowledge and identify opportunities to simplify and integrate products.
• Works with management on the development of Software Engineering governance and performance-management processes.
• Helps define, develop, and deliver training and education for systems users, Software Engineering colleagues, allied groups, and other stakeholders.
• Acts as senior individual-contributor engineering owner across the Catalog (XMM / SPI) and Service Quoting Service (SQS) surfaces — including APIs, data pipelines, UI components, and supporting infrastructure. Recognizes Catalog as the load-bearing pricing source for Quoting, Schedule, Engage, Inspect, and external DMS providers, and evaluates changes with awareness of downstream impact and blast radius.
• Leads brownfield modernization efforts across the Catalog and Quoting estate, including Oracle → Aurora PostgreSQL migration paths, monolith decomposition, Parquet-cache strategy, and AI-assisted parts lookup and ACES record mapping.
• Designs and evolves DMS-partner integrations, including contract negotiation support, SLA-aware client design, circuit breakers, and per-partner incident-response playbooks. Partners with the Synchronizers team on contract evolution and with the Catalog data-pipeline team on parquet-conversion and DDS publishing changes.
• Owns engineering observability and resiliency for assigned services, including New Relic APM dashboards, Splunk structured JSON logging with x-correlation-id propagation, PagerDuty on-call rotations, Production Readiness Review (PRR) artifacts, game-day rehearsals, and tenant-scoped (per-dealer) debugging aligned to a sharded architecture.
• Owns spec-driven development (SDD) design, specification, and task artifacts.
• Mentors junior-level engineers; raises the bar on code review, design review, and PRR rigor; partners with Architecture, QE, DBA (mandatory review for production schema changes), and Product on cross-domain decisions.
• Contributes senior IC perspective to roadmap planning, including VIN-specific pricing integration into DMS-partner workflows, Class 4–8 vehicle support, AI-generated parts lists and repair workflows, integrated shop-supply and tax estimation, and continued reduction of manual onboarding cost for Catalog setup.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline and 8 years' experience in a related field; or a different combination, such as a master's degree and 6 years' experience; a PhD and 3 years' experience in a related field; or 16 years' experience in a related field with no degree.
• 8+ years of Java / Spring Boot experience at scale (Spring Boot 3.x); demonstrated ownership of high-throughput backend services in production.
• 4+ years of AWS cloud-native engineering using: EKS, ECR, S3, IAM least-privilege, AWS Secrets Manager, Terraform / Terragrunt IaC with tag-pinned module refs and no manual console changes.
• Advanced skills in analytical thinking, requirements analysis, software installation and support, system and technology integration, and technical troubleshooting.
• Strong collaboration, innovation, and execution skills, with the ability to influence across teams.
• Datastore breadth: Oracle (legacy XMM) plus Aurora-style RDS / Aurora PostgreSQL (target state); S3 cache and Parquet conversion for high-throughput pricing lookups.
• API design discipline: URL-path versioning, X-Correlation-Id propagation, and third-party APIs published via the Cox API Storefront; JUnit 5 + Mockito and strong code coverage practices.
• Observability and on-call: New Relic APM, Splunk structured JSON logging, PagerDuty rotations, PRR artifacts, and Production Incident Response Workflow.
• Possesses CI/CD fluency: Jenkins, Harness, GitHub Enterprise, Artifactory, Veracode SAST, and SonarQube quality gates enforced in the development lifecycle.
• Brownfield modernization track record: experience with significant data-platform or relational-engine migrations (e.g., Oracle → Aurora PostgreSQL), monolith decomposition, or comparable.
• Multi-tenant, multi-partner integration experience — including per-dealer data isolation, OEM data sources (Motor / ACES), and partner-based SLAs and incident-response processes.
• Experience with pricing engines, catalog domains, or similarly critical data platforms, with the ability to reason about downstream consumer impact across multiple systems.
• Ability to influence engineering decisions through ADRs and SDD artifacts rather than positional authority.
• Experience working within structured engineering governance frameworks (e.g., Constitution-aligned, spec-driven development environments).
• Cross-functional partnership with Product, Architecture, QE, DBA, Synchronizers (DMS integrations), and data pipeline teams.

Preferred

• Typically 10–15 years of experience in distributed systems, with deep expertise in Java, AWS EKS, and Terraform-based infrastructure.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Claude Code, constitutions, and context packs) and interest in driving adoption across teams.
• Exposure to OEM-data ingestion (Motor / ACES) or comparable third-party data-licensing pipelines.

To be employed in this role, you’ll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.Through groundbreaking technology and a commitment to stellar experiences for drivers and dealers alike, Cox Automotive employees are transforming the way the world buys, owns, sells – or simply uses – cars. Cox Automotive employees get to work on iconic consumer brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and industry-leading dealer-facing companies like vAuto and Manheim, all while enjoying the people-centered atmosphere that is central to our life at Cox. Benefits of working at Cox may include health care insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401(k)), and paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO). For more details on what benefits you may be offered, visit our benefits page. Cox is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer – All qualified applicants/employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to that individual’s age, race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cox provides reasonable accommodations when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with disability, unless such accommodations would cause an undue hardship.

EOE, including disability/vets