Sr Software Engineer

Company
Cox Automotive - USA

Job Family Group

Engineering / Product Development

Job Profile

Sr Software Engineer

Management Level

Individual Contributor

Flexible Work Option


Hybrid - Ability to work remotely part of the week

Travel %

No

Work Shift

Day

Compensation
Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $101,500.00 - $169,100.00. 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.

Job Description

Cox Automotive's Common Consumer team builds the distributed services platform that powers consumer experiences across the Cox Auto portfolio. Our services - orchestration services, rules engines, data resources, and consumer-facing UIs - are consumed by adopter teams across the company to deliver features to millions of car shoppers, owners, and sellers. We run cloud-native, multi-region, event-driven infrastructure on AWS and operate within a SAFe Agile Release Train, connecting platform capabilities to measurable business outcomes.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who brings strong engineering fundamentals, a cloud-native mindset, and deep fluency with AI-augmented development practices . You will be a key technical contributor on a high-impact team - writing production-grade code, influencing architecture decisions that ripple across every team that adopts our platform, and helping define how modern engineering gets done at Common Consumer.

This is not a role where AI tools are optional or experimental. Our team works end-to-end in a spec-driven, Claude Code-native development model: every feature begins with a clear, well-structured specification; implementation is driven through Claude Code with strong human review at every step; and engineers are fully accountable for the code that ships. We expect Senior Software Engineers to be fluent in this model from day one - authoring specs, directing agents from them, validating and refining their output, and continually raising the team's bar on responsible AI use.

Our Team

Common Consumer sits within Cox Automotive's Consumer organization. We operate as a collaborative platform team that values engineering craft, continuous improvement, and building systems that other Cox Auto engineering teams rely on every day. Near-term, you'll contribute to the Consent and Communications Decisioning platform - an event-sourced system that captures consumer consent at scale, maintains the projections that answer "may we contact this consumer, on this channel, for this purpose, on behalf of this dealer," and enforces TCPA, CAN-SPAM, and DNC compliance across the Cox Auto portfolio. If you thrive in an environment where your contributions are visible across the business, your ideas are heard, and AI tooling is a first-class part of your workflow - you'll fit right in.

What You'll Do

• Serve as a core contributing engineer on a lean team delivering Common Consumer platform capabilities - orchestration services, rules engines, data resources, eventing contracts, and consumer UIs - operating in our spec-driven, Claude Code-native development model end-to-end .
• Practice spec-driven development (SDD) as the team's default operating model: drive epics, features, and stories from clear, well-structured specifications co-authored with AI before implementation begins, with intent, scope, and acceptance criteria locked down upfront. Use Claude Code as the primary implementation surface - directing agents from specs, reviewing and refining their output, and contributing to the team's shared agent context (CLAUDE.md, agent skills, MCP integrations) so the team's AI workflow keeps compounding.
• Contribute across the consent and communications platform's full evolution - from the intake service through the operational event store, the address-keyed and consumer-keyed projection pipelines, the decisioning API, and the supporting subsystems (DNC sync, EBR ingestion, enrichment). Reason about event-sourced design choices - immutability, projection rebuilds, choreography vs. orchestration, multi-region consistency - that shape the platform for years, not just the current iteration.
• Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code across our stack - C#/.NET for back-end services, TypeScript/React for consumer and back-office UIs, and Node.js for BFF layers - owning end-to-end quality and operational support for business-critical components that adopter teams depend on, including monitoring, incident response (IRW/PIR), and continuous reliability improvement. Take full accountability for every change that ships, AI-generated or otherwise.
• Contribute meaningfully to architectural and design decisions alongside principals and architects, ensuring implementations align with Common Consumer standards - multi-region deployment, event-driven patterns, naming and component conventions (ui / service / engine / resource), and long-term platform strategy.
• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform across our multi-account AWS footprint (team / stage / prod) and multi-region deployments (us-east-1, us-west-2), with ECS/Fargate for compute and a strong emphasis on scalability, reliability, failover, and cost-efficiency.
• Work with MongoDB (including MongoDB Atlas as our operational event store), DynamoDB, S3 as an immutable event archive, and in-memory caching layers (Redis / Valkey) to build performant, event-sourced services; troubleshoot complex distributed-systems issues using observability tooling and Claude Code-assisted root-cause exploration .
• Contribute to platform modernization efforts - framework upgrades, legacy refactors, and adoption-guide improvements - using Claude Code to analyze existing code, propose updated patterns, and execute refactors at scale with human review .
• Help define and evolve team coding standards, engineering best practices, and the team's playbook for responsible, effective AI use - prompt patterns, spec templates, review gates, and quality bars.
• Provide technical mentorship and informal leadership to less experienced engineers, including direct guidance on writing effective specs, directing Claude Code agents, and validating their output against engineering, security, and compliance requirements.

Who You Are

• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline and 4 years' experience in a related field; or a master's degree and 2 years' experience; or a Ph.D. and 1 year of experience; or 12 years' experience in a related field with no degree.
• Currently authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship.
• Active, daily use of Claude Code (or equivalent agentic coding tools) and spec-driven development practices - comfortable authoring structured specifications, directing AI agents from them, reviewing and refining generated code, and taking full ownership of the result.
• Hands-on production experience with C# / .NET (ASP.NET Core) - including middleware pipelines, dependency injection, hosted services, and graceful-shutdown patterns.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating AWS event-driven systems on containerized compute (ECS/Fargate) - including some combination of EventBridge, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, and Firehose - with infrastructure-as-code via Terraform.
• Hands-on experience with MongoDB (or comparable document databases) in production, including schema/index design for document-shaped data and operating considerations.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating REST APIs with OAuth/M2M authentication, idempotency, and well-defined error contracts.
• Experience with Agile and/or Value Stream-based delivery models.
• Availability for rotational on-call duties outside of standard business hours may be required.
• Kansas City based candidates only - in office 3 days a week is required.

Preferred:

• Experience authoring and maintaining shared AI agent context - CLAUDE.md / agent instructions, reusable skills, MCP servers and integrations - so the team's AI workflow improves over time rather than living in individual heads.
• Experience designing and running AI-assisted workflows beyond code completion - multi-step agent flows, subagents, automated review/test loops, or MCP-based access to internal systems (e.g., GitHub, Slack, Rally, observability tools).
• Experience with event-sourced and/or CQRS architectures - immutable fact streams, derived projections / read models, projection rebuilds from source events, and reasoning about read-after-write sequencing across async boundaries.
• Experience designing for durability and idempotency in event-driven systems - claim-before-emit patterns, conditional-write idempotency stores, DLQ-backed retries, and RPO/RTO reasoning.
• Experience with MongoDB Atlas at scale, including Global Clusters / multi-region deployments, Change Streams, and Atlas operational patterns.
• Experience with multi-region AWS architectures - multi-AZ baseline, active/passive failover, active/active routing, and Terraform module patterns that make region addition a config change rather than a redesign.
• Experience with bulk data reprocessing and backfill on AWS - AWS Glue, Athena, S3-based replay - and the operational patterns that make backfills zero-downtime alongside live traffic.
• Experience integrating with enterprise platform services (auth, event buses, dealer/account authorization, integration platforms) owned by other teams - including API contract negotiation, caching, and fail-open/fail-closed decisions.
• Experience building systems that handle PII or other regulated data (e.g. TCPA, CAN-SPAM, GDPR/CCPA, HIPAA, PCI) - encryption, access auditing, immutable archival, retention policies, audit trails, and decision-record provenance.
• Experience with distributed-systems observability - distributed tracing across async boundaries (e.g. EventBridge), correlation-ID propagation, structured logging, and APM tooling such as New Relic.
• Familiarity with choreography vs. orchestration trade-offs (EventBridge DAGs, AWS Step Functions) and rule-engine or decisioning-system design.
• Familiarity with React, Back-end-for-Frontend (BFF) patterns, CloudFront, and modern front-end build pipelines.
• Familiarity with AWS Lambda (used in adjacent Common Consumer workloads, though not our current build direction).
• Track record of mentoring engineers and contributing to team engineering culture.

Technologies You'll Work With

• AI-Augmented Development (core to how we work): Claude Code as the primary implementation surface, spec-driven development (SDD) end-to-end , MCP-integrated workflows (GitHub, Slack, Rally, observability), CLAUDE.md / agent skills, GitHub Copilot
• Languages: C# / .NET 8 (ASP.NET Core), TypeScript, Node.js, Bash, HCL (Terraform)
• Cloud & DevOps: AWS Fargate (ECS), EventBridge, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, Data Firehose, AWS Glue, Athena, Step Functions, ALB + Regional WAF, Route 53, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, Lambda (adjacent workloads); Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker
• Databases: MongoDB / MongoDB Atlas (Global Clusters, Change Streams), DynamoDB, Redis / Valkey, S3 as immutable event archive
• Front End: React, Back-end-for-Frontend (BFF), CloudFront-hosted SPAs
• Architecture Patterns: event-sourcing & CQRS, two-tier projection models, choreography + orchestration DAGs, multi-AZ → multi-region active/active, idempotency-by-claim, DLQ-backed retries
• Integration & Auth: Bridge 2 OAuth (M2M), DDAM (Dealer Data Access Management), CIP (Cox Integration Platform)
• Observability: New Relic APM, distributed tracing, correlation-ID propagation, structured JSON logging
• Tools & Practices: SAFe Agile, CI/CD
• Special Focus: Consumer consent & communications decisioning platform - regulated PII, TCPA / CAN-SPAM / DNC compliance, immutable audit trails, decision-record provenance

Drug Testing

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.

Benefits

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.

About Us

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