Director of Software Engineering, Platform Services

Credit Acceptance is proud to be an award-winning company recognized both locally and nationally across multiple workplace categories. Our world-class culture is shaped by dedicated team members who are driven to succeed as professionals individually and together as a team. Backed by a strong product, exceptional people, and a stable financial foundation, we’ve grown into a leading provider of used and new car financing across the country.

• This position will work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required. However, this position is permitted to work at a Southfield, Michigan office location if requested by the team member.
• Provide the strategy, leadership and day-to-day management of the Platform Services organization.
• Lead the team in developing, enhancing, and supporting a set of integrated platform services for Credit Acceptance engineering teams to leverage in releasing high quality software to its customers.
• Define the company’s approach to AI-assisted and specification-driven development, including coding assistants, agent development frameworks, and the standards and guardrails required to release their output safely.
• Deliver the golden path templates, scaffolds and reference implementations that engineering teams use to start new work, including the frameworks and patterns those templates establish.
• Own the development environments and inner loop tooling engineers use daily, including build and test performance and environment provisioning.
• Be accountable for the availability, performance and support model of the shared services the organization operates, including service level objectives and on-call coverage for those services.
• Create and manage the Platform Services experience required to quickly, reliably, efficiently, and securely deliver value to developers, and grow adoption across the product verticals so that the supported path is the default path.
• Partner with the teams that operate delivery pipelines, cloud infrastructure and runtime platforms to deliver and support the capabilities this organization builds.
• Establish and report the measures of engineering productivity, platform adoption and service performance, along with the progress of the organization’s projects.
• Refine and deliver on a strategy that aligns platform goals to business objectives, priorities, and budgetary realities, weighing build, buy and open source options against the company’s ability to operate what is selected.
• Ensure Credit Acceptance’s engineering tooling and shared services meet the company’s security, privacy and audit requirements and align with corporate goals.
• Support business growth initiatives from a Platform Services point of view by aligning the technology vision with business strategy.
• Build and manage diverse engineering teams capable of carrying out ambitious platform software initiatives, recruiting and developing engineering leaders and top engineering talent in the Platform Services space.
• Set the direction of the team; anticipate strategic and scaling-related challenges via thoughtful planning, both from a personnel and technical standpoint, and lead organizational change in alignment with the company’s objectives.
• Break down platform strategy and team asks into correct technical building blocks, mentoring the team’s technical output and keeping skills and knowledge current.
• Provide continuous feedback, address underperformance, and recognize the individual strengths and contributions of team members.
• Drive a results-oriented culture with a strong focus on execution, quality, and speed, and keep the quality bar high for the services other teams depend on.

• →BS/MS in Computer Science, engineering/technical degree, MBA preferred
• →10+ years of experience in highly technical roles in development or enterprise services, at large organizations or innovative startups
• →5+ years of supervisory, consultant or team lead experience, with demonstrated ability to manage multiple teams.
• →Track record of delivering internal developer tooling, developer platforms or shared engineering services that were adopted by other engineering teams.
• →Experience leading the adoption of AI-assisted software development at scale, including coding assistants, agentic development workflows, evaluation, and the guardrails required to release generated code.
• →History of owning services in production, including service level objectives, on-call rotations and incident response.
• →Proven ability to consolidate duplicated capabilities into a single supported platform, including the migration and decommissioning work required.
• →Demonstrated ability to communicate with C-Level leaders, conveying complex information in a timely and easily understood way to all levels of the organization.

• Familiarity with agent development frameworks, model access layers or other AI platform capabilities
• Background in a regulated industry, or working closely with security, audit and compliance functions

• Working knowledge of the financial services industry, loan origination systems, web-based applications, and the automotive industry

• Working knowledge of the modern developer toolchain, including source control and code review workflows, continuous integration, containers, infrastructure as code, and developer portal or service catalog products.
• Proven ability to think strategically, align technical initiatives with business objectives, and formulate a team’s technical strategy and roadmap in partnership with other teams.

• Success growing a team and fostering a collaborative, ambitious, and outcome-driven culture that embodies company values.
• Comfortable with navigating hard-to-follow (or non-existent) processes and comfortable identifying processes which aren’t working and changing them.
• History of using data for decision making and providing a strong technical vision that your teams deliver against consistently.
• An automation mindset that strives to reduce manual interventions wherever relevant.
• Strong executive presence and ability to advance ideas and initiatives, keeping the customer and the company’s best interest in mind.

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

To create an environment where people do their best work, we focus on the dimensions of Organizational Health. All leaders must:

• Identify the Right People by recognizing top talent
• Set Clear Expectations by managing change and directing others
• Train team members and focus on developing talent
• Performance Manage by ensuring accountability and driving results
• Create the Right Environment by establishing trust and managing conflict
• Maintain the Right Number of team members needed to build an effective team

• Remain compliant with our policies processes and legal guidelines
• All other duties as assigned
• Attendance as required by department