Staff Software Developer, Search & Distributed Systems

About ACV

If you are looking for a career at a dynamic company with a people-first mindset and a deep culture of growth and autonomy, ACV is the right place for you! Competitive compensation packages and learning and development opportunities, ACV has what you need to advance to the next level in your career. We will continue to raise the bar every day by investing in our people and technology to help our customers succeed.

We hire people who share our passion, bring innovative ideas to the table, and enjoy a collaborative atmosphere.

ACV is a technology company that has revolutionized how dealers buy and sell cars online. We are transforming the automotive industry. ACV Auctions Inc. (ACV), has applied innovation and user-designed, data driven applications and solutions. We are building the most trusted and efficient digital marketplace with data solutions for sourcing, selling and managing used vehicles with transparency and comprehensive insights that were once unimaginable.

We are disruptors of the industry and we want you to join us on our journey. Our network of brands include ACV Auctions, ACV Transportation, Clear Car, MAX Digital and ACV Capital within its Marketplace Products, as well as, True 360 and Data Services.

Benefits

At ACV we focus on the Health, Physical, Financial, Social and Emotional Wellness of our Teammates and to support this we offer:

• Company Sponsored (paid) Healthcare, Dental, Vision, Life/AD&D, Short-Term and Long-Term Disability.
• Comprehensive additional optional benefits such Critical Illness and Supplemental Life/AD&D.
• All insurance benefits go into effect on your date of hire.
• Generous Parental Leave Top-Up Pay and Vacation Programs.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program with additional opportunities to earn stock in the company.
• Retirement planning through the Company's RRSP.

The Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who would thrive on being accountable for our Search infrastructure: its scalability, reliability, and data resiliency. We don't just need someone who knows how to write a complex query; we need a battle-scarred Distributed Systems expert who understands the deep internals of Elasticsearch and who has a deep toolbox for analyzing, monitoring, alerting, and quickly resolving critical issues as they arise.

You know exactly how Elasticsearch fails, why it fails under load, and how to architect a topology that prevents it. Because our search ecosystem doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you will also own the architectural connective tissue—ensuring our service layers and event-based ecosystem interact with Search flawlessly.

As a Staff Engineer, you will set the technical standard, drive systemic reliability, and mentor senior engineers across the organization.

What You Will Do

• Architect for Scale: Design, configure, and scale our Elasticsearch clusters. You will define our global strategies for shard routing, Index Lifecycle Management (ILM), heap tuning, and data tiering to support massive auction throughput.
• Master the Failure Modes: Anticipate and engineer away points of failure. You will design circuit breakers, implement back pressure mechanisms, and tune asymmetric timeouts to prevent retry storms between our BFFs, K8s services, and the Search layer.
• Expert Troubleshooting & IR: Act as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex, cross-system performance degradation. You will dive deep into JVM metrics, Garbage Collection pauses, K8s network bottlenecks, and slow logs to uncover and remediate root causes.
• Holistic System Ownership: Manage the entire data lifecycle. You will optimize the ingestion pipelines syncing our event data streams driven by producers and consumers (Kafka) to Elasticsearch, ensuring eventual consistency and data integrity at scale.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Draft authoritative architectural Blueprints, SOPs, and Runbooks. You will elevate the surrounding engineering culture by coaching teams on distributed systems design, observability best practices, and incident management.
• Modernize & Innovate: Scan the horizon for emerging technologies. You will help evaluate and integrate next-generation search capabilities (e.g., Vector Search, RAG…