Principal Software Engineer, Platform Services - Credit Acceptance Corporation

Credit Acceptance is proud to be an award-winning company with local and national workplace recognition in multiple categories! Our world-class culture is shaped by dedicated Team Members who share a drive to succeed as professionals and together as a company. A great product, amazing people and our stable financial history have made us one of the largest used car finance companies nationally.

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!

Job Profile Summary
At Credit Acceptance, Platform Engineering is focused on engineering Developer platforms in Cloud, SRE, DBRE and DevOps areas to help our Development teams build secure, cloud-based microservices. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to assist us to modernize, help drive ‘Golden-Path’ approaches and to guide Platform Engineering strategies across many technology domains. The ideal candidate is experienced in cloud, CICD, observability and database automation. Additionally, the ideal candidate has experience in monolith to microservice transformations and building out ‘Golden Path’ Platform Engineering approaches. From day one, you’ll have an immediate impact on the day-to-day efficiency of our Platform and Tools and an ongoing impact on our overall growth. The Principal Software Engineer for Platform Engineering demonstrates and encourages a culture of automation, security, orchestration and efficiency. This position is key to driving our Platform Engineering strategy in alignment to our department and business goals.

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 ​
• Provide thought leadership and build software solutions that deliver high impact business value and deliver customer delight
• Lead the design and implementation of software solutions that are scalable, reliable, and maintainable
• Collaborate with a diverse cross functional team including business partners, Product Managers and designers to define product requirements, direction and clarity
• Drive technical innovation and improvements of the design and architecture of software systems towards leading edge technologies and practices
• Define, develop and drive software engineering best practices
• Become an expert in the business process domain to better support the business and align technologies with the business outcomes
• Work with the engineering leadership team to develop and execute on the company’s technical and business strategy
• Conduct impact analysis to proactively identify impact of a change across multiple applications/systems
• Perform technical due diligence and architectural assessments of third-party technologies and solutions.
• Define developer tooling improvements that will bring efficiency as we decompose a monolithic code base to decoupled services
• Experiment and test ideas, validate assumptions against needs, reach conclusions and recommend solutions
• Document standards, best practices, and engineering artifacts so others can easily understand, build and maintain best in class platform engineering systems
• In partnership with platform engineering domains, debug the critical problems which arise in production and execute effective solutions
• Lead continuous learning and process improvement activities to improve design and overall engineering practices
• Grow talent by participating in hiring and mentoring team members
• Develop standard architectural practices and lead solutions development across partner engineering groups
• Define and document best practices and strategies regarding cloud deployments and maintenance
• Ensure application performance, uptime, and scale, maintaining high standards of quality and thoughtful design
• Inventory runtime and observability tooling to assist in consolidation and optimization across engineering.
• Partner with leaders and engineering counterparts to drive improved runtime practices for Site Reliability
• Assist in leading the transformation of our database automation practices as we shift from manual DB migrations to pipeline driven DB migrations.
• Drive strategic cloud direction in partnership with cloud engineering team; inclusive of a comprehensive FinOps strategy to ensure cloud cost optimization is a continuous focus.

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
• Minimum 10 years of cloud, infrastructure, site-reliability and pipeline automation experience or comparable depth of experience
• Experience developing and managing Infrastructure as Code, leveraging tools such as Terraform, Ansible, GitHub, etc.
• Experience in the lead role overseeing technical direction of a team of platform engineering talent across multiple systems
• Expert knowledge of cloud and runtime best practices with experience building backend platforms to support complex software engineering products
• Experience in observability and resilience at runtime inclusive of APM, RUM, Logging, Circuit-Breaker patterns as well as release strategies like Blue/Green and Canary.
• Proven track record driving continuous improvements with cloud technology
• Extensive experience with building and driving adoption of platform engineering best practices
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud computing, and microservices architectures
• Demonstrated ability to work with business partners, cross functional team members and coach and mentor experienced team members
• Well versed in delivery mechanisms such as Agile

Preferred:

• 15+ years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience
• Financial services or FinTech industry experience
• Experience in a hybrid Cloud/Data Center environment supporting various multi-tier and microservice applications
• Experience in driving runtime best practices for observability, tooling consolidation
• Experience with SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS deployments in the Cloud
• Experience developing and maintaining performance metrics and graphs
• Depth in experience helping lead enterprise wide Cloud transformations in AWS
• Moderate experience in Azure, Oracle and Google Cloud platforms
• Experience with Kubernetes cluster and orchestration platforms (EKS, Rancher)
• Experience in automating builds on a Kubernetes platform
• Experience with backup and data protection technologies
• Understanding of Oracle database technologies (Oracle, GoldenGate and OEM)
• Experience with AWS native database technologies like RDS and Aurora
• Experience with alerting tools like PagerDuty
• Understanding of Site-Reliability best practices such as Post-Mortems, ‘Golden-Signals’ and Production Readiness Reviews.
• Experience working with monitoring/trending software such as CloudWatch, ELK, Splunk, etc
• Advanced knowledge of DevOps processes and building ‘Golden-Path’s for Developers leveraging internal developer portals, automation, etc

Knowledge and Skills:

• Architecture and Design: Ability to implement world class solutions that meet the needs of the business and customer, and help deliver growth and innovation.
• Leadership: Be a thought leader and demonstrate leadership to mentor team members, influence change and drive for the business outcome
• 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
• Strong 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
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Target Compensation: A competitive base salary range from $177,801 -  $260,774.  This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 20-60%. Final compensation within the range is influenced by many factors including role-specific skills, depth and experience level, industry background, relevant education and certifications. 

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. 

INDENGLP

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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.

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Play the video below to learn more about our Company culture.