Principal Software Engineer, Backend - Full or Part Time

About Autotrader

We’re the UK’s leading automotive marketplace, a heritage brand, and a tech darling of the stock market. We bring together vehicle buyers and sellers to give them real choices. Cars may be what we're best known for but we’re also the place for pretty much everything else on wheels, from e-bikes to caravans.

About the role

We're looking for Principal Software Engineers to help us build a technology platform for more than just the needs of Autotrader.co.uk.

Utilising our public-facing web services and additional external data sources means that we'll be able to power businesses across the automotive industry.

Spring Boot, Apache Solr, Cloud SQL and Apache Kafka power our platform and process millions of events per day. As a team, our software developers are responsible for ensuring service availability and responsiveness continue to improve. They work on systems that handle thousands of requests per second, with sub-100 millisecond response times, servicing requests from over 50 client applications.

Our tech community value collaboration and teamwork. Interactions such as pairing, code reviews and regular stand-ups mean our software developers stay connected. Our principal engineers play a visible and vital role, are comfortable talking about system design and architecture, and know how to get the best out of our teams and our technology platforms. We actively encourage AI-assisted workflows. Whether it's using GitHub Copilot to eliminate boilerplate or LLMs to bounce ideas around, we give you the tools to move faster and focus on the hard engineering problems.

You might assume that our name, "Autotrader," means you need to be a car enthusiast to work here. But that's not the case. We're looking for people who are passionate about their work and thrive in a collaborative environment.

What we're looking for

A thorough understanding of Java and the JVM

Knowledge of server-side frameworks such as Spring

Web application design and RESTful API know-how

A structured approach to programming and testing, such as TDD

Proven experience mentoring, coaching and sharing technical expertise

Architectural and system design knowledge

Experience leading and delivering technical projects

SQL/Relational databases

Document/Map based storage (eg: MongoDB)

Working with Kafka messaging/streaming

Benefits and more

We’re offering a salary of £60,000 – £80,000, plus an additional 10% of your salary awarded to you in shares each year. These awarded shares will become yours in yearly instalments over the next three years, and you can choose to either sell them or keep them as shares. And you'll receive 28 days holiday, plus bank holidays and comprehensive private medical cover.

That’s not all. You'll be enrolled in our pension scheme, where our standard contributions are 7% and employee contributions are 5%. We also have comprehensive private medical cover, enhanced family leave provisions, a car salary sacrifice scheme, share-save options, and much more.

On top of all that, our hybrid model, Connected Working, combines the best of both worlds – office and home working. You'll spend a minimum of 3 days a week in the office with your team, focused on collaboration and connection.

Additionally, we have our remote-first periods at set times during summer and winter. During these periods, you can work remotely anywhere in the UK and from certain locations abroad.

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