Edmunds.com Careers, Benefits, Review

At Edmunds, we strive to create products that everyone can use to make their car buying experience easier. Welcoming and supporting diverse perspectives and experiences here at Edmunds is what makes this achievable. In addition to our culture of TRUST (an acronym of our values consisting of Transparency, Resourcefulness, Urgency, Simplicity and Togetherness), we believe in a culture that promotes diversity and inclusion.  

All employees at Edmunds have a responsibility to foster this culture, and in addition, our Leadership team and Diversity & Inclusion Task force provide dedicated focus to our on-going efforts. Some achievements of the Task force and other stakeholders include: 

• Interview training, which highlights the importance of diversity and brings attention to unconscious bias during the recruiting process. 
• Our Social Impact Paid Time Off Policy, which encourages employees to dedicate time to contribute to positive social change. 
• A Guide to Difficult Conversations, which was developed to encourage important dialog and create an environment of openness and learning.
• Development sessions focused on learning more about coworkers, celebrating diversity and creating space for related conversations. Plus much more!

Additionally, we currently have five Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) which are employee-led and company-sponsored groups of volunteers with a particular commonality or interest to share a space, support each other and spread awareness. In 2021, employees launched the following ERGs.

• AWE (Accelerating Women @ Edmunds): Dedicated to providing leadership, education, and community engagement opportunities that recognize the value that women, allies, and those at the intersection of identities bring to our organization and community. 
• People of Color & Allies (POCA): A community of support for networking, education, inclusivity, honest dialogue, and sharing for People of Color and their Allies. 
• Edmunds PRIDE: Promoting Respect, Inclusivity, Diversity and Equity. A safe space for people to share their thoughts and experiences through inclusivity and open mindedness. Our goal is to create a sense of belonging and camaraderie where members support one another, provide sounding boards, and learn from each other. 
• Edmunds Strong: Empowering Mental Health for All. Connecting and supporting employees impacted by mental conditions, whether personally, as a caregiver, through a family member or friend, or as an ally. As a group, we foster an open and supportive environment for employees to feel connected. 
• EdVets: A community focused on Veterans, active duty and friends or family of those in the military to foster support, networking, career development, transition skills, and outreach.

Throughout the year, we have a calendar of offerings which includes development sessions, external speakers, EdTable Talks to discuss related articles/videos/books/movies, ERG sponsored events, and so much more! 

Through these efforts, our goal is to continue to foster a sense of belonging, celebrate diversity, build upon our unique culture at Edmunds, encourage important conversations, and to create a space of inclusivity.

“As an individual contributor, employees can make a huge impact in their organization every day by seizing opportunities to become involved. Participation is key! In 2020, Edmunds established a diversity and inclusion task force to foster inclusiveness and launch new diversity-focused initiatives within the organization. I was thrilled to become a part of this group and have participated in several workshops, celebrations, lunch and learns, and discussions around diversity with my peers.

Edmunds also recently launched a number of employee resource groups. I was inspired and called to sign up as a co-leader of the People of Color and Allies group. Whether it’s committing to a leadership role within an ERG or participating as an active member, you can make a contribution to driving the change you wish to see. You can also inspire others to participate in these offerings and be the bridge between your organization and peers to facilitate education and dialogues in diversity and inclusion. It’s an ongoing effort that can lead to powerful change. Small commitments over time can be the stepping stones you need to make a bigger impact within your organization.”

Danielle, Manager, Implementation

Advice from our Senior Engineers:

“Find an environment and culture that cultivates opportunities to expand your skill set while giving you the time and support you need to grow your repertoire. Nothing can replace professional experience, so finding a company that encourages growth and views software development as constantly evolving will do wonders. 

Dedicate your own time to professional development, whether it’s doing a side project, joining meetups or listening to tech talks. You may not see immediate returns, but throughout your career you will get back everything you put in and more.”

Long, Senior Software Engineer

“(Advice for leadership) Don’t do it alone! Find a mentor or a few who inspire you and ask them for input. Seek connections with your peers within your organization and beyond. They will be your day-to-day support group.

Also, find ways to keep learning and improving. I’ve been fortunate to have consistent support from Edmunds.com’s employment experience team that offers annual leadership courses that focus on various aspects of the trade. If your company does not offer such forums, ask your mentors and peer network for training referrals that will help you in your leadership journey.”

Nadia, Executive Director, Software Engineering

"A data engineer has to be proficient with a different tech stack that will help them build and maintain great data pipelines. However, just as a front-end engineer needs to be proficient with a technology stack that will help them build great front ends, so too does a data engineer have to be proficient with a different technology stack that will help them build and maintain great data pipelines.

As for my current role, that technology stack and technical skill set consists of Java, Scala, Python, and SQL as the linguistic foundation and the Apache Spark ecosystem as the large-scale data processing engine. Add to that a bit of Airflow for scheduling and orchestration of pipelines and Databricks for the data processing platform in which to run those pipelines, and you have the foundation of the technical skills and tools I use most often during my workday."

David, Data Engineer 5

Learn more about what it's like to work at Edmunds:

How Every Employee Can Move the Needle on DEI

Unlocking the Artistry of Data Engineering

Stacks on Stacks on Stacks: The Skills These Developers Swear By

Owning Your Leadership Style: Advice From 4 Women in Tech

Through our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program, our employees are equipped with the opportunities and resources to contribute and make lasting impact to the well-being of the local communities where we work and live.

Under the CSR umbrella, Edmunds Cares was created to encompass our employee volunteer efforts and community outreach initiatives. Edmunds has donated funds, goods, and services to various organizations and causes that are important to employees and their communities.

Edmunds has also established a Social Impact Paid Time Off Policy to encourage employees to participate in causes that are important and personal to them. 

In partnership with CarMax’s CSR efforts, Edmunds employees have access to the CarMax Matching Gifts Program. This program allows employees the opportunity to support their favorite non-profit organizations by matching money donated and volunteer hours contributed. 

In addition to supporting our local communities, Edmunds is also dedicated to finding innovative ways to raise awareness for environmentally friendly practices through our Edmunds Steering Green Program. Some of those initiatives include: energy conservation, utilization of environmentally friendly products, preservation of natural resources, education offerings,  leadership opportunities, and much more.

ABOUT OUR ENGINEERING TEAMS

Data Engineering

Edmunds.com is all about data, big data! We are fast becoming the de facto standard by which automotive information is defined in the United States. We collect detailed user behavior for over 20 million unique visitors a month. You will get hands-on experience solving complex data problems using advanced data engineering frameworks and methodologies. Scala, Airflow, MLFlow, Delta are some of the tools we leverage, and we encourage our data engineers to constantly develop and adopt new fireworks to keep the competitive advantage both in business and personal career development. You’ll be helping the company make sense of the torrent of data it receives, empowering analytics and machine learning to provide insights and propel the company’s growth with new real-time data driven products.

Service Engineering

Have we mentioned we're all about data? Service Engineering plays a pivotal role in delivering real time, dependable car data to our users. Our team uses Java and Javascript to build fast, resilient, highly available, and scalable microservices, Rest APIs & GraphQL to expose content to applications. We develop and enhance various data curation systems and utilize cloud-native software deployments applying AWS managed solutions and DevOps skills. These services are used to build customer experiences for millions of people to do research and to find the best car deals. 

Cloud and Security Operations

The Edmunds.com Cloud & Security Operations department is for people who can define, design and develop solutions balancing urgency, business processes, system quality and innovation. You will break down technical challenges into their component parts and do your best work with a distributed team centered out of our Santa Monica office. As a Software Engineer, you will be a forward-thinking team player ensuring Edmunds’ technical systems and applications work optimally and deliver their intended value. If they do not, you will be an active participant or leader in finding a solution that does.

Product Engineering

Using cutting edge technologies, the product engineering team develops, maintains and continuously improves our product offerings that empower consumers in their next car search. The Product Engineering team consists of many subteams, including:

Ads Solutions Team: Responsible for growing and transforming digital automotive advertising. We drive online engagement with our dealer partners’ digital advertising, own advertising infrastructure initiatives, and provide technical expertise in integrating with the ever-evolving Ad Tech space.

Appraisals Team: Helps consumers make smart decisions by providing accurate and unbiased used car valuations based on our corpus of transaction data. The team also simplifies the process by working with our strategic partners to provide firm offers for used cars entirely online. 

Search Engine Optimization Team: We maintain and develop the means for monitoring, analyzing, and influencing organic traffic to our site. We are relentlessly focused on improving our search rankings by developing strategies and executing on them to ensure optimal traffic performance.

CarCode Team: CarCode is our messaging platform that is used by hundreds of our dealer partners that leverage chat and messaging for helping consumers make car buying easier.

LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Technology Conference & Hackathon

Every year, Edmunds hosts an internal technology conference. Speakers include engineers from the company who share new developments with our technology stack as well as outside engineers who lend a new perspective to our engineering work. We also host annual hackathon events, during which the entire company, not just engineering, gets to have fun and innovate.

MORE RESOURCES

Hear from some of our leaders:

Nitin Mahajan, Executive Director, Service Engineering talks “Data APIs & Beyond”

See what we're up to on our engineering blog, check out our Twitter @EdmundsTech, explore engineering roles on our careers site

Learn more about our stack https://stackshare.io/edmunds/edmunds

Open Source

In our quest to make car buying easier, Edmunds encounters some unique technology challenges. We’ve open-sourced some of our solutions to these and actively work with the community to improve them.

Edmunds Open Source (GitHub)

A Year of Learning at Edmunds

• At our most recent learning event, the theme of Blockbuster movies and tv shows carried excitement throughout the day, starting with our virtual blue carpet premiere, where we strutted our stuff and reminded everyone that we know how to turn up the glitz and glam.  

The Blockbuster Learning Event:

• Blue Carpet Premiere: Instead of being in person walking down a red carpet, employees sent in photos of themselves dressed to the nines to virtually “walk” the blue carpet. It was amazing to see our friends and colleagues in their glamor, since we’ve been working remotely in less than Hollywood attire day in and day out. 
• The company was divided into 5 teams, represented by our Edmunds Values, to encourage some friendly competition! Points could be earned through participating in sessions, as well as through our Slack channel where employees shared some of their favorite movie quotes and many even dressed up to earn points for the #InCharacter challenge. 
• We created a Marquee of featured showings including a wide array of topics covering Soft Skills Development, Business Knowledge, Well-being and Personal Interests. Sessions were hosted by both external guests as well as our very own Edmunds employees, and covered topics like Imposter Syndrome, Product Strategy, Time Management and Music Theory. Participation on the day of the event was incredible with most employees dedicated the entire day to their personal learning and development and connecting virtually with their colleagues. 

Application

Thanks for your interest in working at Edmunds! Once someone on our recruiting team has reviewed your background, and if it looks like there could be a good fit, we will contact you (typically within 2-3 weeks, hopefully sooner) to set up a conversation.

Recruiter Screen

If your background seems like a good fit, one of our recruiters will reach out to schedule a call. This is an opportunity for us to learn more about your background and experience, and for you to learn more about the company and the position.

Hiring Manager Screen

If we feel like your background and skill set are a match based on your resume and conversation with the recruiter, we will set up a meeting for you with the hiring manager. They will take a deeper dive into your background, assess technical skills and ask about situations in which you’ve demonstrated competencies necessary to do this job. For positions within Technology, most hiring manager screens will include a live coding exercise. 

Assignment (if applicable)

To better gauge your analytical and technical skills, some of our teams will ask you to do an assignment or case study. You will typically be given 1 week to complete the assignment, and a follow-up meeting will be scheduled for you with the hiring manager and/or hiring team to present the assignment. 

Team Interview

Our team interviews range from 2 - 6 hours depending on the team and level of the position. Our interview panels typically are made up of the hiring manager, other team leads or managers within the department, peers in similar positions, and possibly members of cross-functional teams. Interviews consist of multiple sessions covering both technical skills and behavioral questions. This is a great opportunity for you to learn more about the company and position, and to hear from individuals offering multiple perspectives. 

Offer

If both you and the team mutually agree that the opportunity is the right fit, we will move forward with an offer. Your recruiter will extend the offer and walk you through our benefit offerings and onboarding process. Welcome to the team!