Distinguished Software Engineer

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

• •Enterprise target architecture: Convene the principal and staff engineers who own each domain to define the end-state architecture across originations, servicing, marketplace, data, and AI, and use it to drive the multi-year plan. Ensure every component has a defined interface with stated inputs and outputs, every unmade decision has a written principle standing in for it, and the document states honestly how close the organization is to the end state. Publish the architecture, including the tradeoffs that were rejected and why.
• •Agentic AI architecture across the enterprise: Own the enterprise agent architecture spanning servicing and collections, the dealer side, originations, and internal engineering and back-office workflows, built on one common foundation rather than one stack per team. Establish a governed way for agents to discover and call business capabilities, data, and tools, using the Model Context Protocol as the integration layer. Define an identity and authorization model that treats an agent as a first-class actor with its own least-privilege entitlements, along with observability, evaluation, and cost controls that work consistently for every agent. Set policy on what an agent may decide independently versus what stays with a person, and define where that line moves and on what evidence. Design the architecture to produce an examiner-ready record of what each agent saw, recommended, and touched, and set the evaluation and adversarial testing approach that makes agent outcomes defensible. Ensure the same foundation and controls apply to agents built by outside firms on the company's behalf.
• •Migration off on-premises infrastructure: Own the technical strategy for migrating transactional and analytical workloads off on-premises infrastructure to the company's strategic targets — AWS for transactional workloads and Databricks for analytical workloads — determining what lifts and shifts, what replatforms, what gets re-architected on the way versus after, and what the steady-state cost looks like. Own the resilience and recovery architecture for the target state.
• •Data platform architecture: Set the architecture for change-data-capture-based ingestion, streaming where warranted, and a modern warehouse with no job-scheduling dependency, moving the organization from largely batch analytical data movement to real time. Help settle the open question of who owns the transactional and analytical data models.
• •Real-time decisioning, model serving, and experimentation: Architect for pricing and credit model and scorecard updates that drop in as a layer rather than requiring a multi-quarter rebuild, and for an experimentation platform that supports orders of magnitude more concurrent experiments than a conventional release process allows.
• •Marketplace and search architecture: Own the architecture and interfaces for a unified vehicle inventory, consumer search, and lead routing platform, ensuring the data model supports more than one class of seller from the start.
• •AI-native engineering practice: Define the golden path for how software is specified, generated, reviewed, tested, and deployed, including the analyzers and gates that enforce it, and measure the inputs to that practice rather than just the outputs. Hold the build-versus-buy bar for AI capability, building what is core competency and about to scale, and renting the rest.
• •Performance and peak readiness: Own the instrumentation, baseline, and remediation architecture needed to meet the standard that no page takes more than one second. Own peak-event headroom, including understanding the limits of each system and maintaining tested degradation levers ahead of need.
• •Operating approach: Move the organization from project-shaped systems toward owned platforms with stated contracts. Document every component's inputs and outputs, and be ready to argue why closely coupled components should not be consolidated into one. Work toward a two-week requirement-to-production iteration bar, treating architecture that cannot be delivered incrementally as unfinished. Name what comes off the plan whenever a change in direction is requested. Make the call and own the outcome on architectural recommendations. Treat security, privacy, auditability, and regulatory obligation as design inputs from the start in this regulated environment.
• •Hands-on, not hands-off: This is not optional. Stay personally engaged in the technical work rather than directing it from a distance. Join design reviews, write proofs of concept, read code, and engage in incident analysis. This hands-on time does not replace the work the teams own, and it is not a fallback when delivery slips. Every engineer in the organization will read how you write, how you argue a design, how you handle being wrong, and how you treat engineers who disagree with you as the bar. Staff and principal engineers should be measurably better at this work for having worked with you.
• •Success measures: A published target architecture the domain owners agree with and that the annual and long-range plans are actually written against; an enterprise agent foundation that internal teams and partners build on, with access controls, evaluation, and audit records in place; a credible, dated, costed migration path off on-premises infrastructure and demonstrated progress against it; measured improvement in chosen input metrics such as latency, availability, recovery objectives, deployment frequency, and experiment throughput; growth in the number of principal and staff engineers who are better at this work as a result of this role; and architectural decisions that stop being relitigated because the reasoning was written down and the interfaces were clear.

Competencies

• •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 busi