Role overviewThe Senior Support Engineer is the technical specialist inside Customer Operations & Support who closes the gap between "a dealer reports a problem" and "Engineering has a clean ticket to act on." You will reproduce defects, read traces and logs, validate IMS partner integrations, and decide whether an issue is a bug, expected behavior, a configuration problem, or a partner-side failure.
What you'll do- Serve as the technical escalation point for all products, including SaaS ones.
- Reproduce dealer-reported issues in-product, read distributed traces in Observe and Honeycomb, and correlate logs across Site, Dealer Data Service, Pricing services, ML rec models, and IMS partner APIs.
- Distinguish true defects from expected behavior, configuration issues, or partner-side failures (DealerCenter, DealerSync, vAuto, Dealer Specialties, Vincue, MotorcarMarketing).
- Submit clean, reproducible tickets to Product Acceleration (PAES) and Engineering, with steps, evidence, and impact framing.
- Own the FireHydrant trigger decision during business hours for products; coordinate with on-call engineers during incidents.
- Partner with Tier 1 and Tier 2 Dealer Support Operations to handle escalations and upskill the team over time.
- Contribute to and maintain the Product Support Playbook: SLA framework, severity definitions, escalation paths, status page integration, named case routing in Salesforce.
- Validate launch readiness for new products against the COS/Engineering intake gate (uptime SLO, alerting, status page, escalation tree, training, dedicated Slack channel).
- Participate in postmortems and represent the customer-impact narrative; help drive resiliency improvements upstream.
- Build feedback loops with Product Marketing and Sales Specialists so dealer expectations align with what we can support.
What you'll bring- 4+ years in a technical support, support engineering, solutions engineering, or customer engineering role at a B2B company.
- Demonstrated ability to read logs and distributed traces (Observe, Honeycomb, Datadog, Splunk, or equivalent), validate API payloads, and reproduce defects in production software.
- Comfort working with SQL, XML, JSON, and REST API responses; basic scripting in Python, Bash, or a similar language to investigate issues.
- Strong written and verbal communication; able to translate between dealers, account teams, Product, and Engineering.
- Calm judgment in incident situations and the ability to make defensible "is this an outage" calls.
- Experience supporting products with third-party data integrations (CRM, DMS, inventory feeds, ML/pricing services).
- Familiarity with FireHydrant, PagerDuty, or similar incident management tooling.
- Exposure to automotive retail, dealer software, or marketplace platforms.
- Experience standing up support processes for new product launches, not just operating mature ones.
- Salesforce Service Cloud familiarity.
The displayed range represents the expected annual base salary / On-Target Earnings (OTE) for this position. On-Target Earnings (OTE) is inclusive of base salary and on-target commission earnings, which applies exclusively to sales roles.
Individual pay within this range is determined by work location and other factors such as job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
This annual base salary forms part of a comprehensive Total Rewards Package. In addition to benefits, this role may qualify for discretionary bonuses/incentives and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
Position Pay Range
$92,000-$115,000 USD
CarGurus may require in-person interviews as part of our hiring process, particularly for positions based in our Boston and Dublin offices. Candidates selected for an in-person interview will be notified in advance. Please be aware that travel expenses are the responsibility of the candidate.
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