Manager, Engineering (Customer Experience)

Job Description

Job Description

About Carvana...

"We believe CVNA is in the early stages of becoming the next U.S. retail category killer."

– Stephens Investment Bank, Analyst Report, September 2024

Building leading-edge technology has been at the core of Carvana's strategy since our founding, driving us to become the 3rd fastest company in history to organically reach the Fortune 500 following only Amazon and Google. Today, we remain founder-led and as ambitious as ever. In 2024, we have not only emerged as the fastest growing automotive retailer, but also the most profitable thanks to our deep vertical integration across retail, lending, vehicle transportation, wholesale auctions, and more.

If you want to grow not just as an engineer but as a leader and business-builder, Carvana is the place for you. Our technology teams build:

• End-to-end ecommerce for both selling and buying cars, including everything you see on Carvana.com and in our mobile apps.
• AI-driven customer support across chat, email, SMS, and voice, as well as a proprietary CRM platform to ensure the most efficient and highest quality customer experience.
• 360&degree; vehicle photography and interactive merchandising using cutting edge computer vision and AI techniques.
• The most sophisticated and self-service automotive lending platform in the world.
• Systems and tools behind a nationwide logistics network that has delivered and picked up over 3 million cars via our fully owned and operated fleet of automotive haulers, efficiently managing distribution of our massive inventory to 85% of US driveways.
• Enterprise grade systems for operating the largest vehicle reconditioning facilities in the US, with workflow and automation to guide the work for everything mechanical, electrical, and cosmetic needed to bring each car to our high standards.
• Early adoption and customization of AI tools for optimizing our Developer efficiency and experience.

And much, much more…

This is a fully on-site position, Monday through Friday, at our corporate HQ in Tempe, Arizona.

About the team and position

Carvana's Customer Experience team is dedicated to delivering exceptional customer experiences. Our team builds the systems and tools internal team members rely on to guide customers, resolve issues, and ensure a smooth, positive journey. We partner closely with Operations to drive intentional, customer-centric evolution.

As the Engineering Manager, you will guide a team creating products and tools that elevate both the customer and Carvana team member experience. You'll lead and guide engineers as they navigate complex opportunities and unlock innovation using technologies such as React, C#, GraphQL, Python, Azure, Kafka, Agentic Programming, and GPT/LLMs. This role collaborates deeply with product, analytics, operations, and engineering teams across Carvana to deliver high-impact solutions.

Our team is a collaborative, high-energy group committed to customer-centric innovation. If you're excited about building products that simplify and reimagine the customer experience, especially in the era of AI, this is your chance to make an impact.

What you'll be doing

• Lead your team in developing and operating our customer experience platform while diving deep with internal partners to launch new products
• Hire and develop engineers, helping them learn and achieve their own goals while holding them - and yourself - to high engineering standards
• Develop efficient processes, ensuring the engineering team is operating with high velocity, quality, and ownership
• Focus your team on increasing resiliency and uptime while decreasing the blast radius of software changes and tracking, and improving customer-facing metrics
• Work with our product, design, business, and operations teams to develop resilient solutions while driving impact for our car purchasing experience
• Leads with AI first mindset ensuring the team adopts agentic development tools (eg. Claude, Cline) and sets high code quality and output standards
• Comprehensive understanding of metrics and the ability to review the success of a feature and the health of core systems

What you should have

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or similar field from an accredited undergraduate institution required.
• At least 5 years of software engineering, with consistently advancing skills and responsibilities
• A comprehensive understanding of software craftsmanship ideals - clean code principles, unit testing fundamentals, design pattern selection and application, architectural pattern selection and application, and DevOps principles
• Experience creating available, scalable, low-latency, global customer management systems
• Experience debugging and troubleshooting web services, API, and libraries
• Experience or desire to lead a team of Engineers and coach them in their career
• At least 4 years of software engineering, with consistently advancing skills and responsibilities
• Extensive experience with .Net and C#
• Experience with at least one functional/scripting language (JavaScript, Python)
• Strong skills with any contemporary UI framework or library, such as React, AngularJS, or Vue
• Experience in building contemporary scalable solutions, supporting high load and availability, understanding caching, sharding, container-based architecture
• Experience in utilizing agentic tools Claude, Cline, etc.
• Experience in working with any cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, RedHat, etc.)
• Experience in contemporary code quality practices: writing unit and integration tests, using test coverage, CI/CD, etc.
• Excellent interpersonal and organizational skills with the ability to handle diverse situations, multiple projects, and rapidly changing priorities
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation communication skills, especially in representing their technical expertise to a diverse audience
• Self-motivated; work well both independently and collaboratively
• A positive attitude and an excellent sense of humor
• Experience in building a microservice architecture
• Experience in working with data storages (SQL or NoSQL)
• Experience in writing CI/CD pipelines
• Experience in using CDN to deliver static content
• Experience in CQRS and/or Event Sourcing
• Experience in working with GraphQL
• Experience in working with OIDC protocols and managed AuthN/Z frameworks

What we'll offer in return

• Full-Time position with a competitive salary and Carvana stock compensation
• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits
• 401K with company match
• A multitude of perks including student loan payments, discounts on vehicles, benefits for your pets, and much more
• A great wellness program to keep you healthy and happy both physically and mentally
• Access to opportunities to expand your skill set and share your knowledge with others across the organization
• A company culture focused on high performance and bar-raising, with vast opportunity to learn and grow

Don't meet 100% of the qualifications?

At Carvana, we value diversity in backgrounds and experiences. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't fit exactly. Give it a shot!

Legal stuff

Hiring is contingent on passing a complete background check. This role is eligible for visa sponsorship.

Carvana is an equal employment opportunity employer. All applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, age, mental or physical disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law. Carvana also prohibits harassment of applicants or employees based on any of these protected categories.