Distinguished Software Engineer
Credit Acceptance9 days ago
Southfield, MI, USA +2 moreStaff+
Base Salary
$279k - $391k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and publish enterprise target architecture, interfaces, principles, tradeoffs, and multi-year implementation plans across core business domains.
- Own the enterprise agent architecture, including Model Context Protocol integration, agent identity and authorization, least-privilege access, observability, evaluation, cost controls, human decision boundaries, and audit records.
- Set the strategy for migrating transactional and analytical workloads from on-premises infrastructure to AWS and Databricks, including sequencing, resilience, recovery, and cost targets.
- Define modern data platform architecture using change-data-capture ingestion, streaming where appropriate, and real-time analytical data movement.
- Architect real-time pricing and credit decisioning, model serving, experimentation, marketplace, search, inventory, and lead-routing platforms.
- Define AI-native software engineering practices and the analyzers, review processes, testing, and deployment gates that enforce them.
- Own performance instrumentation, remediation architecture, peak-event readiness, degradation controls, and a one-second page-load standard.
- Move engineering toward owned platforms with clear contracts, incremental delivery, and a two-week requirement-to-production iteration goal.
- Personally participate in design reviews, proofs of concept, code review, and incident analysis while making and owning architectural decisions.
- Influence executives and teams across organizational boundaries and develop staff and principal 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 distributed-systems architecture experience and depth in at least two relevant areas, including agentic or LLM-based production systems, large-scale cloud migration, modern data platforms, machine learning platforms and model serving, or high-traffic consumer and marketplace applications.
- Production ownership of agentic or LLM-based systems, including governed tool and data access, evaluation, and failure-mode analysis.
- Demonstrated ownership of legacy-to-modern migration for business-critical systems with production revenue at stake.
- Current hands-on credibility through code reading, proofs of concept, design reviews, and incident analysis.
- Evidence of cross-organizational influence without formal authority, including executive-level direction changes.
- Strong technical writing and executive communication skills.
- Experience developing staff and principal engineers and raising the technical bar for engineers who are not direct reports.
- Experience delivering in a regulated industry or working effectively within audit, security, and compliance constraints.
- Preferred qualifications include external technical contributions, consumer lending or other high-stakes industry experience, Model Context Protocol or comparable standards experience, AWS and Databricks at production scale, experimentation-platform experience, AI-native engineering-practice experience, and marketplace, search, or inventory-system experience.
- Must reside in or be willing to relocate to the greater Southfield, Michigan area; greater Bellevue, Washington area; or San Francisco Bay Area, California.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary range of $279,000-$390,600 plus eligibility for a 20%-60% annual variable incentive of cash and equity.
- Hybrid work model with two work-from-home days and three standard in-office days each week.
- 401(k) match, adoption assistance, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Additional nonstandard benefits and an inclusive equal-opportunity workplace.
Tech Stack
AWSDatabricks
Categories
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.