Director AI Engineering Platform

About the role

The Director, AI Engineering Platform will lead the development and operation of Credit Acceptance's AI engineering platform. This role will ensure that AI engineering capabilities align with enterprise needs, security and risk requirements, cost discipline, and long-term technology direction.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate the vision for Credit Acceptance's AI engineering platform, enabling software engineering teams to build with and alongside AI safely, productively, and at scale.
• Partner with the CTO, VP Platform & Tools, the AI/ML organization, peer directors, and engineering leaders to prioritize platform investments and align AI engineering tooling to enterprise outcomes.
• Own the multi-year roadmap, usage strategy, and cost discipline for how AI capabilities are used across all of Credit Acceptance, including engineering, product, sales, and other functions, regardless of underlying platform.
• Enable software engineering teams across Credit Acceptance to build AI-powered features and adopt AI-assisted and agentic development practices through scalable, self-service platform capabilities.
• Drive production-grade system design and delivery practices, evolving CI/CD pipelines to support AI-generated code, agentic workflows, AI-aware validation, policy-as-code, and progressive delivery patterns.
• Champion adoption of modern AI engineering practices across the software engineering organization, including agentic systems, model context protocol (MCP), AI-assisted development, and emerging patterns in enterprise AI engineering.
• Drive responsible enterprise AI practices for the engineering domain, including access controls, evaluation, cost transparency, and safe usage patterns appropriate to Credit Acceptance's regulatory and risk environment.
• Build a culture of experimentation, measurement, and continuous improvement in how AI creates leverage for software engineering and for the products engineering ships.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field with 12+ years in software engineering, with significant time in platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling roles. Master's degree preferred.
• Minimum 5+ years in senior leadership roles managing managers and large technical organizations.
• Proven delivery of production-grade platform capabilities at enterprise scale, ideally including AI engineering platforms, developer platforms, or distributed infrastructure platforms.
• Experience working in or partnering with AI/ML organizations, with clear understanding of where AI engineering platform ends and AI/ML platform begins.
• Ability to influence executives and guide strategic decisions.
• Experience with budgeting, resource planning, and scaling organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and compellingly.
• Deep knowledge of the modern AI engineering stack, including LLM APIs, AI gateways (e.g., LiteLLM, Portkey, Traefik AI Gateway), MCP, agentic frameworks, evaluation tooling, and AI observability.
• Strong working knowledge of cloud-native platform engineering practices (AWS preferred), including CI/CD, observability, security, and FinOps for AI workloads.
• Demonstrated ability to drive enterprise adoption of platform capabilities, with measurable impact on engineering productivity, quality, or velocity.
• Experience designing and operating production-grade, distributed systems with high reliability, security, and scalability requirements.
• Working knowledge of governance, risk, and compliance considerations for enterprise AI systems.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for executive and non-technical audiences.
• Strong analytical and systems-thinking skills to balance innovation, risk, cost, and developer productivity.

Competencies

• Customer Empathy: Ability to understand the perspectives, pain points, and experiences of customers.
• Engineering Excellence: Pursuing and achieving high standards, best practices, innovation, and superior solutions.
• One Team: Collaborative approach across the organization, working seamlessly without boundaries as a single, cohesive team.
• Owner’s Mindset: Sense of responsibility, accountability, strategic thinking, and proactive approach to managing domains.

Target Compensation

A competitive base salary range from $217,623 – $319,180. This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 20-60%. Bonus amounts are based on individual performance. Final compensation within the range is influenced by many factors including role-specific skills, depth and experience level, industry background, relevant education and certifications.

Benefits

Excellent benefits package that includes 401(K) match, adoption assistance, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, comprehensive medical/dental/vision, and many non-standard benefits that make us a Great Place to Work. Our Company Values: Positive, Respectful, Insightful, Direct, Earnest.

Company Values

• Positive: Maintaining resiliency and focusing on solutions.
• Respectful: Collaborating and actively listening.
• Insightful: Cultivating innovation, accumulating business and role-specific knowledge, demonstrating self-awareness, and making quality decisions.
• Direct: Effectively communicating and conveying courage.
• Earnest: Taking accountability, applying feedback, and effectively planning and prioritizing.

Expectations

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

Advice

We understand that your career search may look different than others. Our hiring team wants to make sure that this would be a fit not just for us, but for you long term. If you are actively looking or starting to explore new opportunities, send us your application!