Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

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!

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 platform engineering solutions that deliver high impact business value and deliver customer delight
• Lead the design and implementation of platform engineering solutions that are scalable, reliable, resilient, reactive 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 platform engineering towards leading edge technologies and practices
• Define, develop and drive platform engineering best practices
• Become an expert in the business process domains 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, upt