Director of Software Engineering, Platform Services

Overview

Lead the Platform Services organization at Credit Acceptance, building and leading teams that deliver the tooling, templates and standards engineers use to build software, along with shared engineering services used across the company, and driving AI-assisted and specification-driven development across engineering.

What you'll do

• Provide the strategy, leadership and day-to-day management of the Platform Services organization.
• Lead the team in developing, enhancing, and supporting integrated platform services for Credit Acceptance engineering teams to release high quality software to customers.
• Define the company's approach to AI-assisted and specification-driven development, including coding assistants, agent development frameworks, and the standards and guardrails required to release their output safely.
• Deliver the golden path templates, scaffolds and reference implementations that engineering teams use to start new work, including the frameworks and patterns those templates establish.
• Own the development environments and inner loop tooling engineers use daily, including build and test performance and environment provisioning.
• Be accountable for the availability, performance and support model of the shared services the organization operates, including service level objectives and on-call coverage.
• Create and manage the Platform Services experience required to deliver value to developers, and grow adoption across the product verticals so the supported path is the default path.
• Partner with the teams that operate delivery pipelines, cloud infrastructure and runtime platforms to deliver and support the capabilities this organization builds.
• Establish and report measures of engineering productivity, platform adoption and service performance, along with project progress.
• Refine and deliver a strategy that aligns platform goals to business objectives, priorities, and budgetary realities, weighing build, buy and open source options.
• Ensure engineering tooling and shared services meet the company's security, privacy and audit requirements.
• Consolidate services used by multiple parts of the organization into a single place, eliminating duplication and modernizing the technology.
• Build and manage diverse engineering teams, recruiting and developing engineering leaders and top engineering talent in the Platform Services space.
• Set the direction of the team, anticipate strategic and scaling challenges, and lead organizational change in alignment with company objectives.
• Break down platform strategy and team asks into technical building blocks, mentoring the team's technical output and keeping skills current.
• Provide continuous feedback, address underperformance, and recognize individual strengths and contributions of team members.
• Drive a results-oriented culture focused on execution, quality, and speed, and keep the quality bar high for services other teams depend on.

What you'll need

• BS/MS in Computer Science, engineering/technical degree.
• 10+ years of experience in highly technical roles in software engineering or technical architecture, at large organizations or innovative startups.
• 5+ years of supervisory, consultant or team lead experience, with demonstrated ability to manage multiple teams.
• Experience leading the adoption of AI-assisted software development at scale, including coding assistants, agentic development workflows, evaluation, and the guardrails required to release generated code.
• History of owning services in production, including service level objectives, on-call rotations and incident response.
• Proven ability to consolidate duplicated capabilities into a single supported platform, including the migration and decommissioning work required.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate with C-Level leaders, conveying complex information in a timely and easily understood way to all levels of the organization.
• Working knowledge of the modern developer toolchain, including source control and code review workflows, continuous integration, containers, infrastructure as code, and developer portal or service catalog products.
• Proven ability to think strategically, align technical initiatives with business objectives, and formulate a team's technical strategy and roadmap in partnership with other teams.
• Success growing a team and fostering a collaborative, ambitious, and outcome-driven culture.
• Comfortable navigating hard-to-follow (or non-existent) processes and identifying and changing processes that are not working.
• History of using data for decision making and providing a strong technical vision that teams deliver against consistently.
• An automation mindset that strives to reduce manual interventions wherever relevant.
• Strong executive presence and ability to advance ideas and initiatives, keeping the customer and company's best interest in mind.

Nice to have

• MBA.
• Familiarity with agent development frameworks, model access layers or other AI platform capabilities.
• Background in a regulated industry, or working closely with security, audit and compliance functions.
• Working knowledge of the financial services industry, loan origination systems, web-based applications, and the automotive industry.

Details

• Work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required, and the position is permitted to work at the Southfield office if requested by the team member.
• Base salary range $208,761 – $306,182, plus an annual variable bonus of cash and equity between 20% and 60%.