Senior Software Engineer II, Core Product
About Motive: Motive is a website platform for franchise auto dealerships. Millions of consumers use our platform every month. Our mission is to make car shopping great by giving simple, easy-to-use websites to auto manufacturers and their dealers. Motive is growing rapidly, with OEM customers such as BMW, Lexus, and Harley-Davidson — as well as some of the largest auto dealers in the world. We are experiencing rapid growth across the entire business. About our team: The Motive team is dynamic and fully distributed — with a small in-person presence at our headquarters in Oklahoma City. We are driven to create exceptionally designed and engineered products that meaningfully impact the world. We’re a smart, thoughtful team where every member is an owner, deeply invested in the success of the business. If you thrive in fast-paced situations, and you are often skeptical of consensus, you will fit in well at Motive. About the Role: We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Core Product Team and help lead the next stage of technical scale at Motive. This role will focus on improving the architecture, scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability of the systems that power thousands of dealership websites and internal platform tools across North America. You will work closely with the CTO and senior engineers to identify high-leverage technical investments, reduce recurring engineering complexity, and help evolve our platform from highly customized implementations toward more scalable, data-driven systems. This role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership and will play a significant role in shaping engineering standards and technical direction across the company. The ideal candidate has strong startup experience, excellent technical judgment, and a track record of improving systems and engineering organizations through pragmatic leadership and execution. They should be comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy and helping teams make thoughtful technical decisions in a fast-moving environment. We are looking for someone who cares deeply about building scalable systems, improving engineering leverage, and helping teams operate at a higher level as the company grows. In this role, you can expect to: Lead architecture and scalability initiatives across our Rails and Next.js platform Improve platform maintainability by helping evolve customer-specific logic into reusable systems and configuration-driven solutions Identify and reduce recurring engineering and operational toil Improve frontend performance, platform efficiency, and overall system reliability Drive technical direction for complex projects spanning multiple product areas Partner closely with product and engineering leadership to make thoughtful long-term technical decisions Raise engineering quality through strong technical mentorship, code review, and architectural guidance Help establish pragmatic engineering standards and scalable development practices Work in a small, elite, cross-functional, and dynamic engineering team where your contributions have an immediate and noticeable impact We are looking for someone who has/is: 8+ years of software engineering experience Strong experience designing and scaling modern web applications and distributed systems Experience operating in startup environments with significant ambiguity and rapid growth Strong technical judgment and systems thinking Experience leading large technical initiatives without formal management authority Highly organized, self-motivated, and detail-oriented, with exceptional ownership and follow-through Comfortable balancing speed, scalability, and pragmatism in a fast-moving product environment We would prefer candidates who have/are interested in the following: Deep experience with Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, and/or Next.js Experience building scalable multi-tenant SaaS platforms Experience improving frontend performance and developer experience Experience evolving systems from custom implementations toward reusable platform architectures Experience mentoring engineers and helping scale engineering organizations Experience working on consumer-facing products Compensation: $160,000 to $200,000 in salary. Exact compensation will depend on experience and demonstrated proficiency during the interview process Your compensation will additionally include meaningful stock option compensation Motive contributes 100% of the cost of employees' health, dental, and vision insurance premiums. For employees’ dependents, Motive covers 50% of their insurance premiums Up to 4% match on Roth or Traditional 401k