[Hiring] Principal Engineer @Ford

Role Description

The Ford Pro Intelligence (FPI) Telematics team is looking for a highly skilled Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision and build web applications and services that will be useful, reliable, and secure products for our customers. This team creates back-end services, data-intensive pipelines, and APIs that are used to help customers understand, manage, and control their fleets of vehicles via web, mobile, and API applications in a high-scale SaaS environment.

Our stack includes:

• Kotlin/Springboot APIs and ETL processors
• React frontend
• PostgresDB & Redis
• GCP (CloudRun, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, BigTable)

The Principal Engineer / Architect will serve as a key technical leader, responsible for driving the architectural vision, designing data-intensive applications, and leading the development of core SaaS platforms, API services, and frontends.

• Architecture and Technical Strategy: Architect, design, and drive the technical roadmap for large-scale, data-intensive SaaS applications that span multiple teams within FPI and partner teams across Ford Engineering.
• Mentorship and Technical Leadership: Act as a force multiplier for the engineering team. Actively lead, mentor, and coach junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Product and Requirements Management: Partner directly with Product, Design, and Business leadership to shape product strategy. Translate complex business needs into scalable architectural designs and technical requirements.
• Project Scoping and Planning: Effectively scope, estimate, and provide architectural blueprints and capacity planning for massive, multi-quarter enterprise initiatives.
• Develop/Test/Deploy: Lead the hands-on development of critical architectural components and complex projects, setting the standard for code quality, system reliability, and deployment practices across the organization.
• Raise the Bar: Elevate the engineering standards across FPI by researching and proposing new internal tooling, architectural patterns, frameworks, and processes to drastically improve efficiency, system performance, and service quality.
• Incident, Problem, Change/Service Requests: Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for critical incidents. Lead complex root cause analysis (RCA) and drive proactive, systemic problem management and defect prevention initiatives.

Qualifications

• English proficiency (written and verbal).
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record in a technical leadership and architectural role.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a combination of education and equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of experience designing and building scalable, data-intensive web applications and SaaS products.
• 5+ years of experience with API development in languages like Java or Kotlin, and modern frontend frameworks like React or AngularJS.
• 5+ years of experience with Relational Databases (like PostgreSQL), NoSQL, and handling high-volume data pipelines.
• Proven experience providing technical leadership across engineering teams, mentoring engineers through architecture and design decisions, and establishing scalable engineering practices, patterns, and delivery standards across complex Agile environments.

Requirements

• Exceptional ability to communicate complex architectural concepts to technical experts, Product Managers, Dev Ops, UI/UX Designers, and executive business stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, RESTful interfaces, and OAS standards.
• Extensive experience with Springboot services and enterprise integration patterns.
• Expert-level knowledge of pub/sub architectures, event-driven systems, and cloud-native capabilities.
• Advanced experience with GCP (BigQuery, BigTable, CloudRun) or equivalent enterprise experience with other cloud providers such as AWS or Azure.

Benefits

• 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.