Jobs and Careers

Senior Principal Software Engineer

CarMax

8116 - Midtown Office, United States, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 2 Apr 2025

About the role

8116 - Midtown Office - 2220 W. Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia, 23220

CarMax, the way your career should be!

About this job

At CarMax, we are industry disruptors. At the heart of our innovation is new digital products. Working on many different aspects of the customer experience, our Senior Principal Engineers research and discover new opportunities and shape products to fulfill them. From inception to completion, you will develop tools and technology, learning quickly from our spirit of experimentation. You will have a direct impact on improving the performance of our business and ensuring customers can buy the vehicles they want in a way that is right for them!

What you will do – Essential Responsibilities

Work closely with fellow engineers to understand their challenges and needs, ensuring that they have the tools and support necessary to succeed in their roles.
Implement best practices for Azure Event Hubs/Kafka concerning partition design, error handling, and patterns for running multiple messaging systems in parallel.
Create a platform for monitoring, observing, and delivering hundreds of application instances.
Investigate and solve network, scalability, and latency issues for cloud-hosted applications.
Lead efforts that promote reliability and cost effectiveness throughout the enterprise.
Collaborate with colleagues in product design, product management and systems architecture to develop experimental solutions and bring great ideas to life.
Market your innovative ideas internally and evolve them according to feedback and critique within an agile environment.
Stay on top of industry trends and best practice to continuously improve what we do and ensure our customer experience is the best it can be.
Provide leadership and mentoring to engineers.

Purpose of the role

Senior Principal Engineers in the Engineering Experience group partner with Engineers and Solution Architects to develop solutions and implement standards that ensure an unrivaled customer experience. You are an expert in your craft and seen as a platform and implementation owner, actively contributing to the industry with a passion for continuous learning.

Senior Principal Engineers practice hands-on development, oversee the technical tasks of others, and own the standards and best practices. Our Senior Principal Engineers act as technical mentors to others, excel in supporting multiple areas of the business, and strive to improve developer experience, helping fellow engineers have a better day at work.

It takes a passion for technology to develop ground-breaking products. Working collaboratively and creatively as part of a close-knit product team, you will be part of the development process from end to end: consulting users, carrying out experiments, tackling complex business problems, and implementing new products. You can balance customer needs with business goals and know how to deliver technical solutions that enhance business value. Creative, curious, and highly analytical, you never stop learning and thrive on constant change in the digital marketplace.

Qualifications and Requirements

Basic Qualifications

Degree in Computer Science, Decision Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent alternative education, skills, and/or practical experience is required
10+ years of relevant work experience

Preferred Qualifications

Expert experience as a software developer working with product teams
Expert knowledge of programming languages/platforms such as C#, .NET, Azure, cloud-based SaaS, and PaaS solutions is preferred.
Expert knowledge of relational databases such as MS and SQL server are preferred.
Extensive experience with API design and integration is preferred.
Exceptional communication skills

Software Specific Qualifications and Requirements

Experience in the following required: