At Credit Acceptance, we are building on the foundation of a successful business while investing in the future through technology, data, AI, and continuous improvement. As we continue to evolve, our Team Members play an active role in improving experiences, driving meaningful change, and shaping the future of our business. We foster an environment where people are empowered to contribute ideas, develop their careers, make an impact, and help lead our continued transformation.
Our Engineering teams are helping shape the future of Credit Acceptance through innovation. Team Members collaborate across the organization to solve complex challenges, build impactful solutions, challenge the status quo, and support informed business decisions. We value curiosity, continuous learning, and new ideas from people who are passionate about driving modernization and meaningful business impact.
Outcomes and Activities:
- Leads and mentors team members on essential agile and product mindset tenets including early learning, self-organized teams, cross functionality, customer obsession, outcome focused, incremental delivery and test driven.
- Participates in work planning processes to ensure the most important work is aligned to the appropriate team, that work is broken down enough that outcomes can be delivered incrementally.
- Leads and mentors cross functional team members on building world class products that deliver customer delight and business value
- Designs solutions to meet requirements for initiatives involving multiple team applications as well as applications owned by other teams.
- Supports delivery teams to ensure process and technology standards are consistently followed to enable consistent delivery of value.
- Develops and tracks delivery metrics while monitoring technical health of the product, informs progress toward delivery goals, and provides support appropriately when needed.
- Builds effective teams by ensuring you have the right people and setting clear expectations
- Monitors and evaluates team performance and continuously coach and mentor team members
- Sets up your team for operational success by having a sound understanding on the system ecosystem, architecture, technologies and system domains and how these are used to achieve business outcomes.
- Is an active participant in on-call escalation and incident management
- Owns the design, delivery, and lifecycle governance of API platforms and services used across teams - driving contract-first design, versioning and deprecation discipline, reuse, and consumer experience.
- Drives adoption of AI across the software development lifecycle (ADLC), establishing standards, guardrails, and measures of effectiveness for AI-assisted engineering within the team.
- Guides the team in identifying, designing, and delivering AI-enabled capabilities - including agentic solutions - with appropriate evaluation, human-in-the-loop controls, observability, and responsible-use practices.
Competencies: The following items detail how you will be successful in this role.
- Customer Empathy: Customer Empathy is the ability to understand the perspectives, pain points, and experiences of customers. It involves actively putting oneself in the customer's shoes, comprehending their needs and challenges, and using that understanding to provide a better, more customer-centric experience.
- Engineering Excellence: Engineering Excellence is about bringing great craftsmanship and thought leadership to deliver an outstanding product that delights customers and solves for the business. This involves the pursuit and achievement of high standards, best practices, innovation, and superior solutions.
- One Team: A One Team mindset refers to a collaborative approach across the organization, where individuals work together seamlessly, without boundaries, as a single, cohesive team. Shared goals, open communication and mutual support create a sense of collective purpose. This enables teams to navigate challenges and pursue shared objectives more effectively.
- Owner's Mindset: Owner's Mindset involves adopting a set of behaviors that reflect a sense of responsibility, accountability, strategic thinking, and a proactive approach to managing your domain. As an owner, you understand the business and your domain(s) deeply and solve for the right outcome for the domain(s) and the business.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience.
- Minimum of 5 years' experience leading engineering teams.
- Proven experience in technical leadership, capable of providing mentorship, cross-functional project execution, setting and executing on technical vision and strategy
- Extensive experience implementing Agile and DevOps practices including but not limited to test driven, incremental releases, continuous integration, and deployment pipeline automation.
- Experience in microservices design strategies and implementation including migration planning, service granularity, interservice communication, traceability, orchestration, and failure isolation
- Experience with Cloud migrations and working in a mixed on-prem / cloud environment (container orchestration, security, serverless)
- Experience leading teams that design and operate reliable distributed services at scale, including performance, observability, failure recovery, and applying AI where it improves system capabilities or operations.
- Experience creating reusable, developer-friendly platforms with self-service onboarding, API observability, and applied AI capabilities such as intelligent APIs, tool/function calling, and MCP-based integrations.
- Experience building secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud platforms, including deployment automation and applied AI workloads such as RAG, model services, agents, and AI-enabled engineering workflows.
- Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to one of the following hub locations: the greater Southfield, Michigan, area; the greater Bellevue, Washington, area; or the San Francisco Bay Area, California.
Preferred Experience:
- 4 years' experience of leading initiatives in a Java ecosystem
- Track record of identifying opportunities to improve outcomes via new tools and approaches, evaluating and measuring candidate solutions, and successfully advocating for their adoption
- Experience applying appropriate levels of transactional and race condition-resilient approaches, including database locking, distributed transactions (XA), SAGA pattern
- Ability to describe and design decoupled system transaction models that are resilient to upstream and downstream outages with appropriate recovery models
- Experience implementing and operationalizing rules engines
- Experience modernizing or decomposing legacy monoliths into API-first, cloud-native services.
- Experience introducing AI capability into an existing engineering organization - building the adoption plan, upskilling engineers, and measuring the impact on delivery speed and quality.
- Exposure to AI platform and tooling ecosystems (model providers and gateways, agent frameworks, vector databases, evaluation and observability tooling for LLM-based systems).
Knowledge and Skills:
- Thought leader with deep technical expertise with the proven ability to influence and partner with business to innovate and drive outcomes
- Ability to communicate complex technical information (both verbal and written) to all levels, including senior leadership
- Ability to solve problems at the source by offering simple, working solutions.
- Anticipates the impact of a change or project across multiple systems.
- Responds promptly and effectively to resolve incidents, tasks, and projects.
- Demonstrated ability and motivation to teach others
- Ability to gain trust of others and builds solid relationships across and vertically throughout the organization
- Effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.
- Able to separate durable engineering fundamentals from hype when evaluating emerging AI tools and patterns, and to make pragmatic build-vs-buy and adopt-vs-wait decisions.
Target Compensation: A competitive base salary range from $155,263 - $227,719. This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 15-30%. Bonus amounts are based on individual performance. Final compensation within the range is influenced by many factors including role-specific skills, depth and experience level, industry background, relevant education and certifications.
This position follows a hybrid work model, offering two work-from-home days and three standard in-office days each week with the team and key stakeholders at the local office.
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Benefits
- Excellent benefits package that includes 401(K) match, adoption assistance, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, comprehensive medical/ dental/vision and many nonstandard benefits that make us a Great Place to Work
Our Company Values: To be successful in this role, Team Members need to be:
- Positive by maintaining resiliency and focusing on solutions
- Respectful by collaborating and actively listening
- Insightful by cultivating innovation, accumulating business and role specific knowledge, demonstrating self-awareness and making quality decisions
- Direct by effectively communicating and conveying courage
- Earnest by taking accountability, applying feedback and effectively planning and priority setting
Expectations:
- Remain compliant with our policies processes and legal guidelines
- All other duties as assigned
- Attendance as required by department
Advice !
We understand that your career search may look different than others. Our hiring team wants to make sure that this would be a fit not just for us, but for you long term. If you are actively looking or starting to explore new opportunities, send us your application!
P.S .
We have great details around our stats, success, history and more. We're proud of our culture and are happy to share why - let's talk!
Required degrees must have been earned at institutions of Higher Education which are accredited by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or equivalent.
Credit Acceptance is dedicated to providing an inclusive environment for all. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and value a culturally diverse workforce. We believe in ensuring all team members demonstrate mutual respect for one another. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to protected characteristics like age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.
California Residents: Please click here for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) notice regarding the personal information Credit Acceptance may collect from you.
Play the video below to learn more about our Company culture.
