Portal & Infrastructure Tech Lead

Faraday Future•El Segundo, CA

21h•$155,000 - $180,000

About The Position

The Portal & Infrastructure Tech Lead will own the technical architecture, engineering execution, and long-term platform quality of the FF EAI Brain Developer Open Platform. You will set the technical direction for how FF's core robotics capabilities are exposed to the world — designing APIs and SDKs that are powerful, stable, and genuinely enjoyable to build with — and you will lead the engineering team that brings that vision to life. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will be expected to make and defend major architectural decisions, review and contribute code, define engineering standards, and serve as the primary technical interface between the platform engineering team and the broader organization — including robotics R&D, cloud infrastructure, product, and security. The ideal candidate is a seasoned platform engineer who has built systems used by large external developer communities, understands what makes an API a pleasure or a pain to work with, and has the leadership range to grow a high-performing engineering team while remaining deeply technically engaged. Someone with strong opinions — grounded in experience — about what makes a great developer platform.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership role (tech lead, principal engineer, engineering manager, or equivalent) on a platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing API product.
Demonstrated experience building systems used by a substantial external developer community.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
Deep hands-on expertise in designing and building RESTful and/or gRPC APIs at scale, multi-language SDK architecture and distribution, API gateway and developer portal infrastructure, and developer authentication systems (OAuth 2.0, API key management, rate limiting).
Working knowledge of robotics software architectures, including middleware frameworks (such as ROS/ROS2 or similar), real-time control systems, sensor data pipelines, and motion planning systems. Direct experience as a robotics engineer is not required, but candidates should be able to communicate effectively and collaborate credibly with technical robotics teams.
Proven ability to reason about distributed systems at scale — including reliability engineering, latency-sensitive API design, graceful degradation, and security threat modeling for externally-facing developer infrastructure.
Strong track record of leading and growing engineering teams, setting technical direction, and communicating complex architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Bilingual proficiency in English and Chinese is required.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience building developer platforms in the robotics, AI/ML, IoT, or autonomous systems domain
Prior work at companies recognized for platform and API excellence (e.g., Stripe, Twilio, AWS, NVIDIA, Google Cloud, or comparable)
Experience designing and operating application marketplaces, including app review pipelines, sandboxing, and developer trust systems
Familiarity with ROS2, URDF, or real-time embedded software frameworks used in legged or humanoid robotics
Experience with usage-based billing infrastructure, developer metering systems, or tiered platform access architecture
Open-source maintainer experience, particularly of developer tooling, SDKs, or API client libraries with significant external adoption

Responsibilities

Own the overall technical architecture of the FF EAI Brain Developer Open Platform — including the API gateway, SDK distribution infrastructure, developer portal backend, authentication and authorization systems, application marketplace, and cloud developer services. Define the architectural principles, scalability targets, and reliability standards that the platform is built to. Make major technical tradeoff decisions and ensure the architecture can support a rapidly growing external developer community.
Lead the design and engineering of the platform's core developer-facing products: the robotics APIs (covering motion control, perception, sensor fusion, autonomous decision-making, and inter-device communication) and the multi-language SDKs (Python, Node.js, Go, Java, and others as needed). Establish and enforce API design principles, versioning and deprecation policies, backward-compatibility standards, and SDK release processes that developers can depend on.
Oversee the technical architecture and engineering delivery of the developer portal — including developer account systems, API key management, usage metering, self-service documentation, sandbox environments, and developer analytics dashboards. Drive the build of internal tooling that accelerates the platform team's own velocity: CI/CD pipelines, automated API testing frameworks, SDK build and packaging automation, and documentation generation systems.
Collaborate closely with the FF robotics R&D and EAI Brain engineering teams to define clean abstraction layers between the internal robotics software stack and the external developer-facing APIs. Ensure that platform APIs expose the right level of capability to developers without compromising system safety, proprietary IP protection, or hardware compatibility across robot hardware generations.
Define and uphold the engineering culture and standards of the platform team — including code review practices, testing requirements (unit, integration, contract), security standards, incident response protocols, and documentation quality. Conduct architectural reviews for major new features and provide technical mentorship to engineers at all levels.
Build, lead, and grow a high-performing platform engineering team. Own hiring decisions, set clear performance expectations, provide ongoing coaching and feedback, and create an engineering environment where the best people do their best work. Partner with product management to ensure engineering capacity is allocated to the highest-impact platform investments.
Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex developer integration issues. Partner with the Developer Platform Operations team on advanced technical support cases, and engage directly with strategic developer partners on integration architecture and best practices. Use insights from developer technical challenges to inform platform improvement priorities.