Credit Acceptance Corporation
Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer, Enterprise AI Enablement
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.
Our Engineering and Analytics Team Members utilize the latest technology to develop, monitor, and maintain complex practices that help optimize our success. Our Team Members value being challenged, are encouraged to express their ideas, and have the flexibility to enjoy work life balance. We build intrinsic value by partnering with all functions of our business to support their success and make strategic business decisions. We focus on professional development and continuous improvement while enjoying a casual work environment and Great Place to Work culture!
Build for leverage: You will design tools, agents, and platform capabilities to be built once and adopted many times across the enterprise. Your goal is not one-off automation, but reusable foundations that enable us to solve new problems faster, with greater consistency and less duplicated effort.
Outcomes and Activities:
- 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.
- Sit alongside the customers, deeply understand their workflows, locate opportunities, and translate what you learn into impactful products
- Convert ambiguous problems into production-ready solutions that are adopted across teams
- Architect, build, and deploy applied AI solutions across high-value enterprise workflows e.g. automation, document intelligence, decision support, fraud intelligence, and intelligent assistants.
- Agent orchestration: Design and implement agentic orchestration systems that manage agent harnesses, context management, tool binding, reasoning steps, and business logic execution
- Knowledge retrieval: Apply modern AI retrieval architectures to index, embed, and surface relevant enterprise knowledge as a foundation for agent context
- Design and develop software and improve existing code to make it more efficient to detect bugs in the code
- Write unit-tests and validate your software against acceptance criteria
- Evolve and transform the design and architecture of applications towards leading edge technologies and practices
- Author, apply and advocate for team coding, documenting and testing standards
- Conduct impact analysis to proactively identify impact of a change across multiple applications
- Learn the business process domain to better support the business and align technologies with the business process
- Experiment and test ideas, validate assumptions against needs, reach conclusions and recommend solutions
- Lead code reviews and communicate application changes
- Document code and projects so others can easily understand, maintain and support
- Debug the problems which arise in production and propose effective solutions within the application and across multiple applications
- Read, write and review design documents
- Contribute to team's sprint commitments and actively participate in our Agile practices, including recommendations for process improvement
- Lead continuous learning activities to improve design and code quality as well as to increase application domain knowledge
- Participate in the talent selection process
- Act as a mentor to guide and review the code, designs and documentation of less experienced software engineers
- Senior Staff: Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior leadership, anticipating evolving customer needs, framing risks and trade-offs, and bringing clarity to where and how AI should be applied
- Senior Staff: Frame and drive build vs buy vs reuse decisions across the portfolio
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 in Computer Science, Information Systems, or closely related field of study; or equivalent work experience
- Staff: Minimum 8 years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience
- Senior Staff: Minimum 10 years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience
- Experience in the lead role overseeing technical direction of a team of software engineering talent across multiple applications
- Demonstrated experience in engineering AI systems, including LLM-driven and agentic architectures, orchestration frameworks, and tool integration
- Proven ability to rapidly prototype and take ideas from POC to MVP to production, building and launching net-new products from the ground up
- Strong understanding and use of one or more object-oriented programming languages and design patterns
- Practical experience in data modeling, design and messaging
- Experience working on mission-critical enterprise class applications
- High ownership and ability to operate in ambiguous environments with a strong bias for action
- Demonstrated ability to coach and mentor less experienced team members
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation
Preferred:
- Advanced understanding of IDEs, have the ability to navigate through them quickly and leverage advanced features to improve your performance
- Experience designing and building production AI retrieval systems (e.g. RAG, GraphRAG)
- Experience building and shipping generative AI systems in production, at scale.
- Deep expertise in operating AI systems in enterprise environments, including reliability, observability, guardrails, and compliance considerations
- Experience building context layers for agentic systems, including multi-source blending, context window management, relevance scoring, and context quality evaluation across heterogeneous data sources
- Experience with AI-oriented data architecture, including vector databases, embedding pipelines, feature stores, data contracts, and knowledge representation patterns such as ontologies and semantic layers
Knowledge and Skills:
- Ability to challenge the status quo and influence stakeholders to create innovative solutions
- Be collaborative with other team members, seeking a diversity of thought to meet business outcomes
- Ability to foster strong relationships across the organization
- Bring a strong understanding of relevant and emerging technologies, provide input and coach team members and embed learning and innovation in the day-to-day
- Experience and understanding of how to connect the work being done and how it drives business value
- Ability to communicate complex technical information (both verbal and written) to all levels, including senior leadership
Target Compensation Staff: A competitive base salary range from $154,837 to $227,095. This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 10-20%. Bonus amounts are based on individual performance.
Target Compensation Senior Staff: A competitive base salary range from $182,601 to $267,814. This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 15-30%. Bonus amounts are based on individual performance.
Candidates who reside in the following major metropolitan areas may be eligible for a premium on top of the posted range based on their specific zone: San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego.
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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 a safe and inclusive working environment for all. As part of our Culture of Compliance, we are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and value our culturally diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of the person’s age, race, color, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status, criminal history, or any other legally protected characteristic.
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.
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