Director, Data Platform

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!

We're seeking a Director of Data Platform to provide technical and architectural leadership within the data engineering organization. In this role, you'll champion to build out a modern data platform across the data space that is critical to the success of modernization and growth at Credit Acceptance. As the director, you'll be responsible for leading the technical vision, strategy, architecture, and execution of the modern data platform, collaborating both within the data team and outside to ensure successful deliveries in production, representing the data team in various technical forums across engineering to enable data capabilities at the ecosystem level. The ideal candidate brings 15+ years of engineering experience with a significant depth in data technology, distributed systems, and cloud services. You'll serve as both a hands-on technical leader and a strategic advisor, helping to establish robust, scalable foundations that enable innovation across the organization.

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.
• Develop and drive the long-term vision for enterprise data platforms and architecture, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and priorities. 
• Formulate and implement the data platform strategy across the data space including but not limited to big data, real time, transaction/operational, governance, observability, integration, and AIML to modernize data capabilities.
• Oversee the design and development of scalable data platform that enable different use cases across the company in order to scale and create self-serve data success.
• Lead the development and continuous evolution of scalable, robust, and business-aligned data platforms, driving the adoption of modern tools and technologies, including cloud-native services, distributed computing, and real-time data processing.
• Effectively communicate data technologies, strategies, roadmap and progress reports to executive leadership teams and stakeholders, ensuring alignment with the company's broader vision and goals.
• Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies, translating them into actionable initiatives to drive innovation and maintain the company's market leadership.
• Build a strong engineering organization and foster solid engineering disciplines by leading by example and mentoring team members.
• Collaborate both with the data team and across engineering on technology and architectural strategy and decision making.
• Exemplify technical innovation and contribute to critical system design, implementation and operation success.
• Formulate technology and architectural decision frameworks that embed engineering disciplines
• Become an expert in the business process domain to better support and align technologies with 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 changes across multiple applications/systems.
• Perform technical due diligence and architectural assessments of third-party technologies and solutions.
• 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 them and build and maintain the best in class software systems
• Debug the critical problems which arise in production and execute effective solutions within the application and across multiple applications/syste