[Hiring] Director of Data Platform @Credit Acceptance

Role Description

We're seeking a Director of Data Platform to provide technical and architectural leadership within the data engineering organization. In this role, you'll champion to build out a modern data platform across the data space that is critical to enable business growth with AI at scale at Credit Acceptance. As a director, you'll be responsible for leading the technical vision, strategy, architecture, and execution of the modern data platform, collaborating both within the data team and outside to ensure successful deliveries in production, representing the data team in various technical forums across engineering to contribute to the success at the ecosystem level. The ideal candidate brings 15+ years of engineering experience with significant depth in data technology, cloud, and AI.

Outcomes and Activities:

• This position will work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required.
• Develop and drive the long-term vision for enterprise data platforms and architecture, ensuring alignment with business growth and AI success.
• Formulate and implement data platform strategy across the data space including but not limited to big data, real-time, transaction/operational, governance, that transform the way how we work with data in the era of AI.
• Oversee the architecture, design, and development of a scalable data platform that enables self-serve success with various use cases across the company by taking a platform and AI-first approach.
• Ensure solid production success that meets business needs and speed, establish strong finops discipline with timely and insightful info to continuously optimize our economics including forecast, runtime, and “showback” to the business.
• Effectively communicate data technologies, strategies, roadmap, and progress to executive leadership and stakeholders, ensuring alignment with the firm’s broader vision and goals.
• Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies, translating them into actionable initiatives to drive innovation and maintain the firm’s market leadership.
• Build a strong engineering organization and foster solid engineering discipline by leading with examples and mentoring team members.
• Collaborate both with the data team and cross-engineering on technology and architecture strategy and decision.
• Exemplify technical innovation and contribute to critical system design, implementation, and operation success.
• Formulate technology and architecture decision framework that embeds engineering discipline.
• Become an expert in the business process domain to better support the business and align technologies with the business outcomes.
• Work with the engineering leadership team to develop and execute on the company’s technical and business strategy.
• Conduct impact analysis to proactively identify the impact of a change across multiple applications/systems.
• Perform technical due diligence and architectural assessments of third-party technologies and solutions.
• Experiment and test ideas, validate assumptions against needs, reach conclusions, and recommend solutions.
• Document standards, best practices, and engineering artifacts so others can easily understand, build, and maintain best-in-class software systems.
• Debug the critical problems which arise in production and execute effective solutions within the application and across multiple applications/systems.
• Lead continuous learning and process improvement activities to improve design and overall engineering practices.
• Grow talent by participating in hiring and mentoring team members.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or closely related field of study; or equivalent work experience.
• Minimum 10 years of software engineering experience or comparable depth of experience.
• Experience in the leadership role overseeing technical direction of data platform, technology, and architecture.
• Expert knowledge of software engineering best practices with experience building modern data platform, product, and solutions, especially in enabling AI success.
• Expert understanding and use of modern data technology end-to-end including but not limited to source system, data integration, data acquisition, data ingestion, data transformation, data aggregation, data governance, business intelligence, data warehouse, data lake, NoSQL, object storage, streaming, etc.
• Extensive experience with building and driving adoption of software engineering best practices.
• Strong understanding of AI, distributed systems, cloud computing, and microservices architectures.
• Demonstrated success in building strong engineering organization and attract/recruit/grow/retain talents.
• Demonstrated success in building mission-critical enterprise-class data platform that delivers business impact.
• Demonstrated ability to work with business partners, cross-functional team members, and coach and mentor experienced team members.
• In-depth experience with building big data real-time production system that delivers business success.
• Experienced in communicating and articulating technology subjects in the context of business and providing timely and clear communication.
• Well versed in delivery mechanisms such as Agile.

Requirements

• Financial services or FinTech industry experience.

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.