Lead Software Engineer, Physical Applications Services
Ford Motor Company· enterprise· Automotive· Aug 17, 2026 · 2mo agoPosted 71 days ago
Palo Alto, CA, United States
In office
Full-time
Lead/Staff
$148K–$190K est.
5+ years exp
Before you apply
Ghost Signal:
Open 71 days.
Job description
You will own the end-to-end design, development, and operation of cloud services on GCP, ensure seamless integration with Ford’s existing cloud infrastructure, and lead SW development toward high reliability, performance, and security.
What you'll do...
• Own architecture and delivery of backend services on GCP that broker and
orchestrate API integrations for vehicle features.
• Design and implement reliable, scalable APIs and event-driven flows (REST/gRPC,
webhooks, Pub/Sub), including rate limiting, retries, backoff, and circuit breakers.
• Define and implement authentication and authorization for partner integrations
(OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, mTLS, JWT), secrets management, and key rotation.
• Integrate services with Ford’s enterprise cloud environment, identity, networking,
and observability tooling; establish secure connectivity (VPC peering/VPN/Private
Service Connect) across clouds as needed. Establish SLIs/SLOs, monitoring,
logging, tracing, alerting, and on-call readiness; drive SRE best practices.
• Lead CI/CD and infrastructure as code; standardize build, deploy, and release
processes.
• Collaborate with security, legal, privacy, enterprise architecture, data, and
vehicle/embedded teams to ensure compliance and robust end-to-end design.
• Mentor engineers, perform design and code reviews, and drive technical roadmap,
documentation, and runbooks.
• Manage cost, performance, and capacity, plan for load spikes and global scale.
• Partner with product and integration teams to onboard third parties and define
partner-facing contracts, SDKs, and sandbox/testing flows.
You'll have...
• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Strong experience designing and operating services on Google Cloud
• Proficiency in one or more languages: Go, Java, or Python
• Experience with API management and partner ecosystems (Apigee/API Gateway,
developer portals, partner onboarding).
• Solid understanding of REST/gRPC, asynchronous messaging, and API-first design.
• Solid understanding of OAuth 2.0/OIDC, JWT, TLS/mTLS
• Proven experience building scalable, highly available systems and operating them
in production
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills across cross-functional teams.
You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply!
As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:
• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.
This position is a leadership level 5 and ranges from $167,200-$316,600.
Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.
For more information on salary and benefits, click here: fordcareers.co
Visa sponsorship is available for this position.
Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.
This position is hybrid. Candidates who are in commuting distance to a Ford hub location may be required to be onsite four or more days per week. #LI-Hybrid
#LI-MZ1 #UEV
Application prep
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Keywords to mirror
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Benefits
Benefits detected in the listing.
Dental
Vision
Paid Time Off
Parental Leave