Staff Software Engineer, Consumer 360 in London

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.

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:

• Customer Empathy: The ability to understand the perspectives, pain points, and experiences of customers.
• Engineering Excellence: Bringing great craftsmanship and thought leadership to deliver an outstanding product that delights customers and solves for the business.
• One Team: A collaborative approach across the organization, where individuals work together seamlessly, without boundaries, as a single, cohesive team.
• Owner’s Mindset: Adopting a set of behaviors that reflect a sense of responsibility, accountability, strategic thinking, and a proactive approach to managing your domain.

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.

Preferred:

• Advanced use of AI-native development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code or similar agents in the IDE and CLI).
• In-depth creation of APIs and frameworks: REST/JSON and legacy SOAP web services.
• 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.
• Experience with AI agent platforms and frameworks.

Knowledge and Skills:

• Ability to challenge the status quo and influence stakeholders to create innovative solutions.
• Be collaborative with other team members, seeking a diversity of thought to meet business outcomes.
• Ability to foster strong relationships across the organization.
• Bring a strong understanding of relevant and emerging technologies.
• Experience and understanding of how to connect the work being done and how it drives business value.
• Ability to communicate complex technical information (both verbal and written) to all levels, including senior leadership.
• Sound judgment about where AI should and should not act.
• Cost-and-value-aware engineering.

Consumer 360 role-specific behaviors:

• AI-First Mindset: Starts from AI when building and running software.
• Customer Data Stewardship: Treats customer data as a trust obligation.

Target Compensation: A competitive base salary range from $154,837 – $227,095. This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 10-20%.

Benefits: Excellent benefits package that includes 401(K) match, adoption assistance, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, comprehensive medical/dental/vision and many nonstandard benefits that make us a Great Place to Work.

Our Company Values: To be successful in this role, Team Members need to be positive, respectful, insightful, direct, and earnest.

Expectations: Remain compliant with our policies processes and legal guidelines. All other duties as assigned. Attendance as required by department.

Credit Acceptance is dedicated to providing a safe and inclusive working environment for all. As part of our Culture of Compliance, we are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and value our culturally diverse workforce.