Distinguished Software Engineer
Credit Acceptance1 day ago
Southfield, MI, USA +2 moreStaff+
Base Salary
$279k - $391k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and publish enterprise target architecture and multi-year technical plans across originations, servicing, marketplace, data, and AI.
- Own the enterprise agent architecture, including capability and data access, identity and authorization, observability, evaluation, cost controls, audit records, and human decision boundaries.
- Develop the migration strategy from on-premises infrastructure to AWS for transactional workloads and Databricks for analytical workloads, including sequencing, resilience, recovery, and cost planning.
- Set architecture for change-data-capture ingestion, streaming, modern warehouse capabilities, real-time decisioning, model serving, and large-scale experimentation.
- Own architecture for unified vehicle inventory, consumer search, lead routing, and marketplace systems supporting multiple seller classes.
- Define AI-native engineering practices for software specification, generation, review, testing, and deployment, including enforcement gates and measurement.
- Own instrumentation, performance remediation, peak-event readiness, degradation controls, and a standard that no page takes more than one second.
- Move the organization toward owned platforms with explicit contracts, incremental delivery, documented decisions, and a two-week requirement-to-production iteration target.
- Remain hands-on through design reviews, proofs of concept, code review, and incident analysis.
- Influence executives and cross-functional teams without formal authority and develop staff and principal engineers across the organization.
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 expertise 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 and marketplace applications.
- Production architecture 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 with code reading, proofs of concept, design reviews, and incident analysis.
- Evidence of influence without authority across organizational boundaries, including executive-level direction changes.
- Strong written communication and ability to create actionable architecture documentation.
- Demonstrated ability to develop staff and principal engineers and raise the technical bar without direct management authority.
- Experience delivering in a regulated industry or working effectively within audit, security, and compliance constraints.
- Residence in or willingness to relocate to the greater Southfield, Michigan; greater Bellevue, Washington; or San Francisco Bay Area hub locations.
- Preferred qualifications include external technical contributions, consumer lending or other high-stakes domain experience, Model Context Protocol or comparable standards, AWS and Databricks production experience, experimentation platform experience, AI-native development practice experience, and marketplace, search, or inventory systems expertise.
Benefits
- Hybrid schedule 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 workplace environment.
- Eligible for an annual variable incentive of cash and equity between 20% and 60%.
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.