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