Staff Software Engineer, Consumer 360

Credit Acceptance Corporation • San Francisco, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Credit Acceptance is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Consumer 360 engineering work. The role leads technical direction across multiple applications and contributes to the modernization and operation of mission-critical services. The engineer designs and improves cloud-native Java and Spring Boot services on AWS, using written specifications, automated testing, and incremental migration approaches. Responsibilities also include production AI agents and secure, governed APIs that make customer context available to other teams’ agents.

The role owns delivery from specification through deployment, advocates for engineering standards, improves delivery flow, and supports reliable production operations. It also includes mentoring engineers, participating in talent selection and on-call rotation, and learning the business domain to align technology with business needs. The position follows a hybrid model: two work-from-home days and three in-office days each week. Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the greater Southfield, Michigan area; greater Bellevue, Washington area; or San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a closely related field, or equivalent work experience.
• At least 8 years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience.
• Experience in a lead role overseeing the technical direction of a software engineering team across multiple applications.
• Expert hands-on Java (17/21) and Spring Boot experience, including production REST and event-driven services, object-oriented design, and design patterns.
• Practical experience with AI-assisted delivery, spec-driven development, test automation, GitHub Actions CI/CD, 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 AWS services, including Kubernetes containers (such as Amazon EKS), GitOps, IAM, 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, including secure tool use, retrieval where needed, evaluations, guardrails, observability, and human oversight for consequential actions.
• Must reside in or be willing to relocate to the greater Southfield, Michigan area; greater Bellevue, Washington area; or San Francisco Bay Area, California.
• Ability to challenge the status quo and influence stakeholders toward innovative solutions.
• Collaborative approach that welcomes diverse perspectives and supports business outcomes.
• Ability to foster strong relationships across the organization.
• Understanding of relevant and emerging technologies, with the ability to coach team members and embed learning and innovation in day-to-day work.
• Ability to connect work to business value.
• Ability to communicate complex technical information verbally and in writing to all levels, including senior leadership.
• Sound judgment about where AI should and should not act, including setting boundaries, keeping people involved in customer-impacting decisions, and evaluating accuracy, safety, prompt-injection and data-leakage risks, and bias.
• Cost- and value-aware engineering skills, including understanding cloud and AI workload cost drivers and making evidence-based trade-offs.
• Required degrees must be from institutions accredited by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or equivalent.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced use of AI-native development tools such as GitHub Copilot or Claude Code, including custom instructions, reusable skills and commands, hooks, and MCP integrations.
• In-depth experience creating APIs and frameworks, including REST/JSON and legacy SOAP services, JUnit 5, Mockito, WireMock, Pact, GitHub, and GitHub Actions.
• Experience with API security, analytics, throttling, caching, logging, and request/response modification.
• Experience with API-first design, including versioned OpenAPI and event schemas agreed before implementation and published for consumers, people, and agents.
• 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, including customer master data, identity resolution, consent and privacy-request fulfillment, and sensitive exchanges such as credit-bureau reporting and disputes (e.g., Metro 2, e-OSCAR).
• Experience with AI agent platforms and frameworks such as Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, Spring AI, or LangChain4j; Python agent frameworks are a plus.
• Experience with LLM evaluation, guardrail, and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and continuously improve cloud-native Java 21/Spring Boot services on AWS, using AI coding agents while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Use spec-driven development: define behavior changes with written specifications, acceptance criteria, and requirement IDs; include specifications with code and use automated unit, integration, and consumer/provider contract tests.
• Lead incremental modernization of Consumer 360 systems, including runtime upgrades, migration from ActiveMQ to managed event-driven messaging, and migration of on-premises workloads and databases to AWS using safe cutovers.
• Author, apply, and advocate for team coding, documentation, and testing standards.
• Conduct impact analysis to identify the effects of changes across applications.
• Learn business processes and align technology with business needs.
• Experiment with ideas, validate assumptions, reach conclusions, and recommend solutions.
• Lead code reviews and communicate application changes.
• Document systems so people and AI agents can build, test, run, and safely change them, including READMEs, agent instruction files, API and event specifications, and decision records.
• Debug production problems and propose effective solutions within and across applications.
• Read, write, and review design documents.
• Own end-to-end delivery flow and improve requirement-to-production time by addressing bottlenecks in specifications, reviews, environments, pipelines, and cross-team dependencies.
• Lead continuous learning activities to improve design and code quality and increase application-domain knowledge.
• Participate in talent selection.
• Mentor less experienced software engineers and review their code, designs, and documentation.
• Design, build, evaluate, and operate production AI agents on AWS, and expose customer context to other teams’ agents through secure, versioned APIs and governed agent tools, with guardrails, evaluations, observability, cost controls, and human review where needed.
• Lead the team’s AI-assisted delivery model from written specification through deployment, maintaining human approval gates and measuring success by quality and lead time.
• Participate in an on-call rotation.
• Perform other duties as assigned and meet department attendance requirements.

Benefits

• 401(k) match
• Adoption assistance
• Parental leave
• Tuition reimbursement
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Other nonstandard benefits
• Annual variable bonus in cash and equity, between 10% and 20%, based on individual performance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior