Software Engineer II

Software Engineer II

Cox Automotive's Common Consumer team (Stratos) 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.

What You'll Do:

• Develop and maintain the team's core eventing infrastructure (Eventing 2.0) — the event bus, message contracts, publishers/consumers, and integration points that other CRM teams and downstream systems rely on, working from designs and direction set by senior engineers.
• Diagnose and resolve issues in high-throughput, high-availability eventing pipelines, including message delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, and dead-letter handling.
• Partner with consuming teams and senior engineers to implement event schemas/contracts and support backward-compatible evolution of the eventing platform.
• Write clean, efficient, and testable code using C#, .NET, and related frameworks.
• Contribute to broader Skynet shared services beyond eventing, including WAF protections and dealership-facing dashboard capabilities, as priorities require
• Participate in the software development lifecycle with a primary focus on coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance, while gaining exposure to requirements gathering and design.
• Collaborate with product managers, UX designers, and other engineers to deliver features aligned with business needs.
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to peers.
• Contribute to improving development processes and best practices, including test strategy and quality gates for eventing changes.

Who You Are:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, and 2+ years' experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and up to 2 years' experience; or 14 years' experience in a related field.
• 2–4 years of professional experience in software development.
• Some exposure to event-driven architecture and message-based systems (message queues, pub/sub, event buses), or a strong willingness to learn — this is the team's core focus area, and mentorship will be provided.
• Proficiency in object-oriented programming and design patterns.
• Experience with web technologies and frameworks (ASP.NET, C#, REST APIs).
• Familiarity with relational databases (SQL Server) and cloud platforms (AWS).
• Willingness to learn distributed systems concepts such as eventual consistency, idempotency, message ordering, and failure/retry handling, with support from the team.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, especially in diagnosing issues across asynchronous, multi-service flows.
• Experience with, or strong curiosity to incorporate, AI into development such as Agentic coding and AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code).
• Applicants must currently be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship. No OPT, CPT, STEM/OPT or visa sponsorship now or in future.
• 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.

What We Look For:

• Substantial personal responsibility and autonomy; ability to plan and manage your own work.
• Strong communication skills, able to collaborate with technical and non-technical audiences.
• Enjoys sharing knowledge with peers and supporting junior engineers through code review and pairing.
• Stays current with emerging technologies and helps the team adopt useful new practices.
• Commitment to ethical AI use and contributing to a positive, inclusive team culture.
• Ability to rapidly absorb new information and apply it effectively to solve complex problems.

Technology We Use:

• Architecture: Event-driven / eventing pipelines (Eventing 2.0), message bus and pub/sub patterns, shared services architecture, Web Application Firewall (WAF) integration
• C#,.NET (including active modernization toward.NET 10), JavaScript
• Messaging/Eventing: Event bus and message queue infrastructure (e.g., AWS SQS/SNS/EventBridge or equivalent), schema/contract management for cross-team event consumers
• Cloud: AWS (including AWS Lambda), CDN infrastructure
• Databases: SQL Server
• DevOps Tools: GitHub Actions, Rally (agile planning)
• Testing: Automated test strategy practices, unit/integration testing frameworks, with particular attention to test coverage for asynchronous eventing flows
• AI Tools: Claude Code

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.

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