CarGurus’ journey building a developer portal and increasing AI adoption

Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

In this episode, Abi Noda talks with Frank Fodera, Director of Engineering for Developer Experience at CarGurus. Frank shares the story behind CarGurus’ transition from a monolithic architecture to microservices, and how that journey led to the creation of their internal developer portal, Showroom. He outlines the five pillars of the IDP, how it integrates with infrastructure, and why they chose to build rather than buy. The conversation also explores how CarGurus is approaching AI tool adoption across the engineering team, from experiments and metrics to culture change and leadership buy-in.

Where to find Frank Fodera :

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankfodera/

Where to find Abi Noda:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abinoda

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Intro: IDPs (Internal Developer Portals) and AI

(02:07) The IDP journey at CarGurus

(05:53) A breakdown of the people responsible for building the IDP

(07:05) The five pillars of the Showroom IDP

(09:12) How DevX worked with infrastructure

(11:13) The business impact of Showroom

(13:57) The transition from monolith to microservices and struggles along the way

(15:54) The benefits of building a custom IDP

(19:10) How CarGurus drives AI coding tool adoption

(28:48) Getting started with an AI initiative

(31:50) Metrics to track

(34:06) Tips for driving AI adoption

Referenced:

• DX Core 4 Productivity Framework
• Internal Developer Portals: Use Cases and Key Components
• Strangler Fig Pattern - Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn
• Spotify for Backstage
• The AI adoption playbook: Lessons from Microsoft's internal strategy