Staff systems engineer, infrastructure

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!

At Credit Acceptance, the Staff Infrastructure Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for technical leadership of core infrastructure platforms, with a primary focus on compute, containerization, virtualization, and storage. This role is designed for an engineer who is deeply hands-on and systems-oriented, with a strong ability to solve infrastructure challenges through automation and code. This role provides technical leadership and mentorship but does not include people management responsibilities.

The Staff Infrastructure Engineer owns complex, cross-cutting infrastructure challenges, setting technical direction, and reducing operational friction across the environment. This role partners closely with engineering leadership, cloud, network, security, and application teams to design and evolve resilient, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure platforms.

A defining characteristic of this role is a strong Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation mindset. The Staff Infrastructure Engineer approaches infrastructure as a software problem—using code, APIs, and automation to deliver repeatable, scalable outcomes, improve reliability, and accelerate delivery. In addition, this role is expected to explore and adopt emerging techniques such as AI-assisted and agent-based workflows where they meaningfully improve infrastructure operations and engineering productivity.

Outcomes and Activities

This position will work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required. However, this position is permitted to work at a Southfield, Michigan office location if requested by the team member.

• Provide technical leadership across compute, storage, networking, Linux, Windows and K8S platforms, ensuring high availability, performance, and security.
• Design and implement enterprise-scale infrastructure solutions that are maintainable, cost-effective, and aligned with business strategy.
• Act as a force multiplier by identifying systemic issues, simplifying complex systems, and reducing operational toil through automation.
• Define and drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, Python, or equivalent.
• Lead the evaluation, experimentation, and adoption of AI-enabled tooling and agent-based workflows for infrastructure operations, troubleshooting, and optimization.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Cloud, Security, and Application teams to design end-to-end solutions spanning data center and cloud environments.
• Perform impact analysis for complex changes and proactively identify risk across multiple systems and platforms.
• Serve as a senior escalation point, leading root cause analysis and driving durable corrective actions.
• Define, document, and socialize engineering standards, reference architectures, and best practices.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through coaching, design reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Influence infrastructure and platform roadmaps and long-term strategy in partnership with engineering leadership.
• Participate in incident response, disaster recovery planning, and on-call rotations as needed.
• Share technical design decisions and reference architectures for assigned domains, partnering with Infrastructure leadership for prioritization and alignment.
• Reduce operational toil, incident recurrence, or manual effort through platform improvements and automation.
• Improve infrastructure reliability, scalability, or delivery velocity through sustained, measurable outcomes.

Competencies

The following competencies describe 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, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering roles with deep hands-on ownership of compute, virtualization, and storage platforms.
• Demonstrated expertise designing, operating, and troubleshooting enterprise-scale compute and virtualization environments, including capacity planning, lifecycle management, availability, and performance tuning.
• Experience leading and supporting large-scale migration initiatives from on-premises data centers to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Strong experience with enterprise storage systems, including:
• Block storage architectures and performance characteristics.
• File and scale out NAS platforms.
• Object storage architectures, including S3 compatible platforms, data durability models, lifecycle management, and cost optimization strategies.
• Design and operation enterprise-grade file services supporting a remote workforce, including secure access patterns, performance optimization, availability, and integration with identity, endpoint, and security controls.
• Hands-on experience operating and integrating storage and data protection platforms such as Pure Storage, Cohesity, and Qumulo, or equivalent enterprise solutions.
• Advanced experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation, with a strong bias toward solving problems through code rather than manual processes.
• Proven use of tools such as Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, Python, Git, or similar.
• Experience designing reusable modules, workflows, and automation patterns.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals sufficient to design and troubleshoot infrastructure across compute, storage, and network boundaries.
• Experience designing and operating infrastructure in virtualized and/or hybrid environments, with the ability to reason about tradeoffs across platforms and architectures.
• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation and lead response efforts for critical infrastructure incidents.

Preferred

• Experience working in hybrid data center and cloud environments.
• Experience with AI-assisted operations, agent-based automation, or applying AI/ML tools to infrastructure workflows.
• Experience with configuration management platforms (Ansible, Puppet, etc.).
• Experience with Kubernetes platforms and orchestration (Rancher, OpenShift, EKS Anywhere or similar).
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms.
• Experience with disaster recovery design, execution, and testing.
• Background influencing or defining platform or infrastructure strategy at the organizational level.
• Deep experience with enterprise virtualization platforms such as VMware, including cluster design, lifecycle management, performance tuning, and availability.
• Exposure to or hands-on experience with alternative or emerging hypervisor and virtualization solutions (e.g., KVM-based platforms, cloud-native virtualization, or vendor-neutral hypervisors), including evaluation, proof-of-concept, or migration planning.

Knowledge and Skills

• Demonstrated ability to own ambiguous, high-impact problems, drive them to durable, well-documented solutions.
• Experience acting as a technical leader across teams—influencing architecture and outcomes without direct authority.
• Strong troubleshooting skills with a track record of resolving complex production issues across multiple infrastructure layers.
• Curiosity and demonstrated interest in modern automation techniques, including AI-assisted or agent-based approaches, with a focus on practical operational value.

Target Compensation

A competitive base salary range from $122,001 – $178,935. This position is eligible for an annual variable bonus of cash and equity, between 10-20%. 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 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 by maintaining resiliency and focusing on solutions.
• Respectful by collaborating and actively listening.
• Insightful by cultivating innovation, accumulating business and role specific knowledge, demonstrating self-awareness and making quality decisions.
• Direct by effectively communicating and conveying courage.
• Earnest by taking accountability, applying feedback and effectively planning and priority setting.

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. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of the person’s age, race, color, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status, criminal history, or any other legally protected characteristic.