Staff Software Engineer, Consumer 360

Credit Acceptance is proud to be an award-winning company recognized both locally and nationally across multiple workplace categories. Our world-class culture is shaped by dedicated team members who are driven to succeed as professionals individually and together as a team. Backed by a strong product, exceptional people, and a stable financial foundation, we’ve grown into a leading provider of used and new car financing across the country.
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!
The Staff Software Engineer is a technical leader responsible for designing and delivering scalable, high-quality software solutions that support business objectives across multiple applications and systems. This role drives technical design, architecture decisions, coding standards, and engineering best practices while solving complex technical challenges and ensuring long-term maintainability and reliability. Working across teams, the Staff Software Engineer provides technical direction, conducts impact analysis, evaluates solution options, and leads initiatives that improve engineering effectiveness. The role mentors engineers, influences technical strategy, promotes continuous learning, and collaborates with business and technology partners to deliver innovative and efficient solutions. On Consumer 360, you will be the senior technical leader for the cloud-native Java services on AWS that give our customers, servicing teams and AI agents accurate, secure customer context: profile and preferences, privacy requests, consumer APIs and identity tokens, and the integrations and workflows behind them. This is an AI-first role. You will set the bar for spec-driven, agent-assisted delivery, and you will design, build and operate production AI agents and the secure APIs and agent tools (such as Model Context Protocol servers) that let other teams’ agents use customer context safely.
This position follows a hybrid work model, offering two work-from-home days and three standard in-office days each week with the team and key stakeholders at the local office.
Outcomes and Activities:
Design, build and continuously improve cloud-native Java 21 / Spring Boot services on AWS, using AI coding agents as everyday tools while owning the correctness, security and maintainability of every change
Practice spec-driven development: start each behavior change from a written spec with acceptance criteria and requirement IDs, ship the spec with the code, and back it with automated unit, integration and consumer/provider contract tests (e.g., Pact) that block the merge when they fail
Lead incremental modernization of Consumer 360 systems: upgrade Java 11 / Spring Boot 2 services to current runtimes, move ActiveMQ integrations to managed, event-driven messaging, and migrate on-premises workloads and databases to AWS, using facades, side-by-side comparison and safe cutover rather than big-bang rewrites
Author, apply and advocate for team coding, documenting and testing standards
Conduct impact analysis to proactively identify impact of a change across multiple applications
Learn the business process domain to better support the business and align technologies with the business process
Experiment and test ideas, validate assumptions against needs, reach conclusions and recommend solutions
Lead code reviews and communicate application changes
Document systems so both people and AI agents can build, test, run and safely change them: READMEs, agent instruction files (e.g., AGENTS.md), API and event specs, and short decision records for significant design choices
Debug the problems which arise in production and propose effective solutions within the application and across multiple applications
Read, write and review design documents
Own delivery flow end to end: measure and shorten requirement-to-production time by removing bottlenecks in specs, reviews, environments, pipelines and cross-team dependencies
Lead continuous learning activities to improve design and code quality as well as to increase application domain knowledge
Participate in the talent selection process
Act as a mentor to guide and review the code, designs and documentation of less experienced software engineers
Design, build, evaluate and operate production AI agents on AWS (Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Spring AI), and expose customer context to other teams’ agents through secure, versioned APIs and governed agent tools (e.g., MCP), with guardrails, offline and online evaluations, observability, cost controls and human review where customer impact requires it
Lead the team’s AI-assisted delivery model from written spec through deployment: evolve its agentic workflows, keep human approval gates, and measure success by quality and lead time rather than tool usage
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 8 years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience
Experience in the lead role overseeing technical direction of a team of software engineering talent across multiple applications
Expert, hands-on Java (17/21) and Spring Boot: building and operating production REST and event-driven services, with strong object-oriented design and design patterns
Practical experience with modern, AI-assisted delivery: spec-driven development, test automation, CI/CD in GitHub Actions and small, frequent releases
Practical experience in data modeling, design and messaging
Experience working on mission-critical enterprise class applications
Demonstrated ability to coach and mentor less experienced team members
Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation
Hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating cloud-native services on AWS, including containers on Kubernetes (e.g., Amazon EKS), GitOps, IAM and secrets management, observability and reliability practices such as SLOs
Hands-on experience designing, building, evaluating and operating at least one LLM-powered agent in production: secure tool use (e.g., function calling, MCP), retrieval where needed, offline and online evaluation, guardrails, observability and human oversight for consequential actions
Preferred:
Advanced use of AI-native development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code or similar agents in the IDE and CLI), including writing custom instructions, reusable skills and commands, hooks and MCP integrations that make the whole team faster
In-depth creation of APIs and frameworks: REST/JSON and legacy SOAP web services, JUnit 5 and Mockito, WireMock, consumer-driven contract testing (Pact), and GitHub with GitHub Actions
Experience in API security, analytics, throttling, caching, logging, request and response modifications
Experience with API-first design: versioned OpenAPI and event schemas agreed before code and published for consumers, people and agents alike
Ability to use DDL to create database objects and relationships, construct advanced queries, and optimize query performance
Financial services industry experience
Experience with customer data in a regulated business: customer master data and identity resolution, consent and privacy-reque