Distinguished Software Engineer
Credit Acceptance24 hours ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Base Salary
$233k - $341k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and publish the enterprise target architecture across originations, servicing, marketplace, data, and AI, including interfaces, principles, tradeoffs, and migration plans.
- Own the enterprise architecture for agentic AI across customer, dealer, originations, engineering, and back-office workflows.
- Establish agent identity, authorization, observability, evaluation, cost controls, auditability, adversarial testing, and human-versus-agent decision policies.
- Lead the strategy for migrating transactional workloads to AWS and analytical workloads to Databricks, including sequencing, resilience, recovery, and steady-state cost planning.
- Set the architecture for change-data-capture ingestion, streaming, modern warehouse capabilities, data-model ownership, real-time decisioning, model serving, and experimentation.
- Own marketplace, inventory, consumer search, lead routing, performance, peak-readiness, degradation, and recovery architecture.
- Define AI-native engineering practices and golden paths for software specification, generation, review, testing, deployment, and enforcement.
- Move the organization toward owned platforms with explicit contracts and incremental delivery while treating security, privacy, auditability, and regulatory requirements as design inputs.
- Remain personally engaged in technical work through code reading, proofs of concept, design reviews, and incident analysis.
- Influence executives and teams across organizational boundaries and raise the technical bar of staff, principal, and other engineers without direct management authority.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a closely related field, or equivalent work experience.
- At least 10 years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience.
- Track record of setting and delivering multi-year technical strategy at enterprise scale as an individual contributor.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture and depth in at least two of agentic or LLM-based production systems, large-scale transactional cloud migration, modern data platform and lakehouse architecture, machine learning platforms and model serving, or high-traffic consumer or marketplace applications.
- Production ownership of agentic or LLM-based systems, including governed tool and data access, evaluation, and failure-mode analysis.
- Demonstrated ownership of a legacy-to-modern migration involving production revenue, including sequencing, cost justification, and failure modes.
- Current hands-on credibility through code reading, proof-of-concept development, design reviews, and incident analysis.
- Evidence of influencing organizational direction and executive decisions without formal authority.
- Strong written communication and ability to create actionable architecture documentation.
- Ability to develop staff and principal engineers and raise the technical bar of engineers who are not direct reports.
- Experience working within regulated-industry audit, security, and compliance constraints.
- Preferred: recognized contributions beyond one employer through open source, standards, publications, patents, or sustained external technical work.
- Preferred: experience in consumer lending, auto finance, insurance, payments, or another high-stakes business-critical distributed-systems domain.
- Preferred: Model Context Protocol or comparable agent tool-integration standards and identity and authorization design for non-human actors.
- Preferred: AWS and Databricks production-scale experience.
- Preferred: experimentation-platform experience, AI-native engineering-practice experience, and marketplace, search, or multi-seller inventory experience.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary range of $232,500-$341,000, plus eligibility for equity and annual cash bonuses.
- 401(k) match, adoption assistance, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits.
- Additional nonstandard benefits and a stated Great Place to Work culture.
- Remote work is indicated by the #LI-Remote designation.
- Equal opportunity and inclusive working environment.
About Credit Acceptance
Credit Acceptance is a public auto finance company that partners with a nationwide network of car dealers to provide indirect vehicle loans to consumers, including those with limited or challenged credit. The company purchases and services retail installment contracts and shares collections with dealers through structured programs. Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, it trades on NASDAQ as CACC and operates across the U.S.