Senior Manager, Application Systems

About this job 

The Senior Technology Manager at CarMax helps bring disruptive innovation to life.  They foster a solution driven mindset for their teams and partner with stakeholders to provide innovative solutions that deliver CarMax's strategic mission and plans.  This Senior Manager grows people, creates teams that solve problems for our Associates and customers and communicates priorities to stakeholders.  The empowered teams of engineers they lead follow the Agile framework and leverage best in class technology to solve complex business problems.  With these teams of inspired associates, if you have a good idea, this is the place to be.

Who we are looking for:
The Senior Technology Manager’s primary responsibility is to partner with their business areas and provide technology solutions and services that help deliver CarMax’s strategic mission and objectives. This position will direct and manage the planning, software development, implementation, administration and maintenance for a large suite of application systems and solutions that focus on upper funnel acquisition, customer activation, and engagement at CarMax. This includes development of long- and short-term technology solutions that address business goals and deliver improved profitability, efficiency and an unrivaled customer experience.  
 
The upper funnel at CarMax is where customers discover, research, and decide on their next vehicle. Some are just starting their discovery, while others are ready to buy. How different personas engage with us across this journey is one of the most important drivers of customer satisfaction and sales. As an industry leader, CarMax has deep data about vehicles and customer needs, and we are re-imagining this experience across every surface customers touch: search, content, brand, and the AI-powered discovery channel's reshaping how shoppers find us. We are doing that through some of the most advanced technologies, including cloud, generative and agentic AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and personalization, with the goal of helping customers spend more time finding than searching, through highly personalized experiences. As discovery shifts toward AI-powered answer engines, this role also helps shape how CarMax shows up across traditional search, generative engines, and the content experiences that bring customers to us.
 
The position partners with a number of business areas including SEO/GEO, Online Platform, DevOps, Marketing, Brand, Design, and Content, and plays a pivotal role in building online buying. 

Position Requirements:

• Strategic planning and results focus
• Identify the appropriate goals for the teams 
• Prioritize business and technology objectives to deliver a holistic approach to omnichannel solutions that includes ROI, time to market, scalability as well as alternative recommendations

Communication

• Partner with business stakeholders, peer groups, the technology leadership team, and key associates
• Communicate the vision and strategy to executive leadership, peers, and teams to support the strategic direction
• Guide teams through execution

Team Leadership and Development

• Attract, recruit, retain and coach a strong team of skilled and engaged associates aligned to the overall mission
• Create clear role expectations and develop associates to reach their full potential, understand their goals and needs, partner in their development, provide advice, feedback, training and advocacy
• Lead engineers through the shift to AI-assisted and agentic development, set the bar for how the team adopts AI tooling, agentic workflows, and new ways of building software at scale

Technology

• Continue to grow one’s knowledge base and stay current with industry trends while also formulating a strategic technology plan for each business area based on in-depth understanding of the current business needs and their future direction
• Partner on customer acquisition strategy and help the business navigate what acquisition looks like as Answer Engines and generative discovery reshape the funnel
• Expand the reach of the CarMax brand through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), so customers find us across both traditional search and AI-driven answer experiences
• Help lead the strategy for content management and customer personalization, the systems and content that power how we acquire, engage, and convert shoppers
• Partner deeply with Design to unlock a modern design-system-to-code pipeline, and build the platform foundations for personalization across the acquisition, search, and discovery experiences
• Lead the team through the next wave of integration change, such as emerging protocols like MCP, agent-to-agent interoperability, and an evolving API and data surface that lets CarMax systems plug into the broader AI ecosystem
• Operate AI-powered discovery responsibly and at scale, set the bar for evals, guardrails, and bias and hallucination monitoring, while managing the latency, reliability, and cost realities of running SLMs and LLMs in the customer path
• Ensure system health, compliance, and secure, efficient operations
• Drive a rigorous experimentation and measurement culture in partnership with Data and Analytics, such as A/B testing, causal measurement, and discovery-quality metrics (relevance, conversion, abandonment) that turn intuition into evidence
• Champion an accessible, high-performance discovery experience, accountable for accessibility (WCAG) and Core Web Vitals as both a customer obligation and a driver of SEO and conversion
• Design for customers and bots as distinct personas, the human shopper and the LLM crawler, AI agent, or retrieval pipeline through common experiences leveraging distinct surfaces, content shapes, and signals

Qualifications

• Passionate about enterprise software, commerce, content, and customer journeys
• Persuasive and effective communicator; able to explain complex or intangible concepts to stakeholders at all levels, including large audiences and executives
• Good listener; weighs input from multiple perspectives when forming opinions and recommendations
• Collaborative and team-oriented
• Experience gaining consensus among a large, diverse group of stakeholders, and ensuring rapid decisions are made
• Experience managing, training and mentoring others in enterprise technology software development and implementation best practices
• Innovative and entrepreneurial; thrives in a fast-paced environment
• Analytical; solves problems at root cause and prioritizes effectively
• Entrepreneurial drive and spirit; enjoys working in a fast-paced environment
• Handles constructive criticism with ease
• Adapts easily and efficiently to organizational and strategic change

Education and Experience:

• BS/BA degree - Technology related, preferred
• 7+ years of experience in enterprise-class technology with 5+ years of application systems development and implementation
• 3+ years of experience managing direct reports
• 3+ years of experience leading transformative and evolutionary software projects
• 3+ years of experience in eCommerce user journeys, customer activation and engagement, or customer shopping funnel
• Experience in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing
• Experience building with generative or agentic AI, LLM-based products, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or AI-driven discovery and personalization

If you think this is you, let us know and apply! 

Work Location and Arrangement: This role will be based out of the Richmond Midtown or Plano Tech hub and have a Hybrid work arrangement.

• Associates based in Richmond work on-site 4 days per week.
• Associates based in Plano work onsite 2 days per week

Work Authorization:  Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Sponsorship will not be considered for this specific role.

About CarMax

CarMax disrupted the auto industry by delivering the honest, transparent and high-integrity experience customers want and deserve. This innovative thinking around the way cars are bought and sold has helped us become the nation’s largest retailer of used cars, with over 200 locations nationwide.

Our amazing team of more than 25,000 associates work together to deliver iconic customer experiences. Along the way, we help every associate grow their career and achieve their best, at work and in their community.  We are recognized for our commitment to training and diversity and are one of the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For®.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion: 

CarMax is committed to bringing together people from different backgrounds and perspectives, providing employees with a safe, welcoming, and inclusive work environment.

CarMax is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. 

Upon an applicant's request, CarMax will consider reasonable accommodation to complete the CarMax Job Application.