Distinguished Software Engineer

creditacceptance; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Credit Acceptance seeks a senior individual contributor to set the enterprise technology direction and influence a long-established lending platform. The role blends hands-on technical leadership with broad architectural influence, guiding migrations to a cloud target and establishing a governed foundation for AI agents.

Success hinges on resolving complex questions and aligning teams that retain ownership of implementation, while ensuring robust audit, testing, and cost controls across domains

Qualifications

• Experience leading enterprise architecture across software and data systems.
• Ability to influence engineering teams without direct management.
• Strong judgment for complex technical tradeoffs in a large platform.

Responsibilities

• Convene domain engineering leaders to define and publish a multi-year target architecture spanning origination, servicing, marketplace, data, and AI systems.
• Document system interfaces, architectural principles, open decisions, rejected tradeoffs, and progress toward the target state.
• Design a shared enterprise architecture for agents, including how they discover and use business capabilities, data, and tools through an integration layer.
• Define agent identity, least-privilege access, monitoring, evaluation, cost controls, and policies for decisions requiring human oversight.
• Establish audit and testing approaches that record agent activity and help demonstrate that outcomes are reliable and defensible, including for externally built agents.
• Set migration strategy for transactional workloads moving to a cloud target and analytical workloads moving to a data platform; guide resilience, recovery, and sequencing choices.

Skills

Enterprise architecture

Technical leadership

Cloud migration

AI systems

Data governance

Cross-functional influence

Job description

Role overview

Set the enterprise technology direction as the senior individual contributor in an engineering organization modernizing a long-established lending platform. The role combines hands-on technical leadership with broad architectural influence: define the target state across business domains, guide migration from on-premises infrastructure, and establish a common, governed foundation for AI agents. Success depends on resolving complex technical questions and aligning teams that retain ownership of implementation.

Responsibilities

• Convene domain engineering leaders to define and publish a multi-year target architecture spanning origination, servicing, marketplace, data, and AI systems.
• Document system interfaces, architectural principles, open decisions, rejected tradeoffs, and progress toward the target state.
• Design a shared enterprise architecture for agents, including how they discover and use business capabilities, data, and tools through an integration layer.
• Define agent identity, least-privilege access, monitoring, evaluation, cost controls, and policies for decisions requiring human oversight.
• Establish audit and testing approaches that record agent activity and help demonstrate that outcomes are reliable and defensible, including for externally built agents.
• Set migration strategy for transactional workloads moving to a cloud target and analytical workloads moving to a data platform; guide resilience, recovery, and sequencing choices.

Requirements

The available source describes expectations and scope but does not provide a complete qualifications section. It indicates a need for enterprise architecture leadership, strong technical judgment across software and data systems, and the ability to influence engineering teams without directly managing them.