Role overviewThe DevX PaaS team builds and operates CarGurus' Kubernetes-based developer platform that enables product teams to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. We're a sub-team within Developer Experience in Engineering Platform, partnering across engineering to remove friction, modernize our stack, and accelerate time-to-market.
This is a player-coach leadership role. As Team Lead, you'll own the day-to-day leadership of a small team of engineers - running ceremonies, planning quarterly capacity, growing the people on your team, and serving as the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform - while staying technically hands-on enough to make meaningful contributions on our most important platform work - autoscaling, agentic automation of cluster maintenance and upgrades, service discovery, and the continued evolution of our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS-native capabilities. You'll be the connective tissue between our platform's technical direction and the developers who depend on it every day.
Three big bets anchor the team's near-term direction: keeping Kubernetes healthy and cost-efficient through autoscaling and increasingly automated maintenance; piloting an AI-assisted support model for developer questions (starting with PaaS); and standing up service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to simplify how services connect. Everything below ladders up to these themes.
What you'll doLead the team
- Own team operations for DevX PaaS: run 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and quarterly capacity and project planning, and represent PaaS in Engineering Platform planning and prioritization forums.
- Grow the engineers on your team through coaching, feedback, and equitable allocation of high-impact, growth-oriented work - including an "epic lead" model where engineers own end-to-end delivery of major initiatives.
- Shape the team's quarterly portfolio so that the team's energy is spent on the highest-leverage work, balancing a heavy load of non-discretionary platform work (upgrades, migrations, maintenance, on-call) against modernization and strategic initiatives.
- Be the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform - framing problems, aligning on scope, and making sure downstream teams understand impacts and timelines.
Drive the platform (hands-on)
- Help design, build, and operate the Kubernetes platform on AWS EKS with a focus on reliability, security, and developer ergonomics (multi-env, multi-region).
- Guide the team's Controller/Operator and deployment model (e.g., CGService) to provide consistent, self-service delivery across repositories and environments.
- Lead critical upgrades and rollouts: Kubernetes, Rancher, and routine add-on upgrades utilizing ArgoCD and HCP Terraform.
- Set the direction for autoscaling across product and EP services - driving automated scale-down, day-2 EKS optimizations, and cost/performance wins in partnership with product teams.
- Champion agentic and AI-assisted workflows for cluster maintenance - automating EKS upgrades, PR generation, and bundled maintenance to reduce manual toil and create predictable, low-disruption maintenance windows.
- Advance service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to provide a robust, automated way for services to find and communicate with each other, reducing hard-coded dependencies and improving system resilience.
- Expand our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS-native capabilities, continuing to shield developers from Kubernetes complexity while modernizing the underlying stack.
- Guide remaining platform modernization, including the tail end of the ingress-nginx retirement / Gateway API migration, to simplify developer configuration and reduce operational toil.
- Pilot a more scalable, AI-assisted support model for developer questions - starting with PaaS - by curating documentation, embedding AI into the support flow, and reducing the manual triage burden on the team.
- Raise platform reliability by hardening alerting/runbooks and participating in the team's on-call rotation with sensible, business-hours expectations and documented handoffs.
Communicate and partner
- Represent PaaS in EP-level forums (all-hands, capacity planning, leads meetings), translating technical trade-offs into clear, audience-appropriate language for both engineers and executive stakeholders.
- Build relationships across DevX, Engineering Platform, and product teams to advocate for the platform work that matters and to keep partners aligned and informed.
- Champion a healthy, customer-centric operating model where platform priorities are visible and traceable to the outcomes our customer teams care about.
What you'll bring- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer in a professional setting, with some experience leading projects, mentoring engineers, or acting as a tech lead / team lead.
- Deep Kubernetes/EKS experience operating production workloads at scale, with proficiency in containerization and cloud environments.
- Strong Go (or equivalent) systems programming skills; familiarity with controller/operator patterns is a plus.
- AWS fluency across core primitives (networking, IAM, load balancing, storage) and platform guardrails.
- Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub-based workflows) and CI/CD automation.
- An observability and SRE mindset: metrics, tracing, logging, SLOs, incident response, and post-incident learning.
- A security-by-default bent: policy-as-code (e.g., Kyverno), least-privilege, image/runtime controls.
- People leadership instincts: you enjoy growing engineers, running a calm and predictable team, and making sharp prioritization calls under competing demands.
- Developer empathy and clear communication; you enjoy building paved roads that hundreds of engineers can rely on, and you can tailor your message to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- An enthusiasm for leveraging AI to accelerate both your team's work and how the platform enables engineering.
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
$154,000-$193,000 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.
