Software Engineer, Distributed Systems & Networking

Ford Motor Company • Palo Alto, CA

3h • $138,800 - $232,700 • Hybrid

About The Position

You will contribute to the design, development, and operation of backend services supporting millions of vehicles globally. You'll help ensure seamless integration with existing infrastructure and support the team in delivering software that is reliable, high performance, and secure.

Requirements

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Proficiency in one or more languages: Go, Java, or Python
• Working understanding of distributed systems communication patterns (REST/gRPC, asynchronous messaging via Pub/Sub, API-first design)
• Experience building and supporting scalable, available systems in production
• Good collaboration and communication skills across cross-functional teams
• Willingness to learn and grow technical leadership skills over time

Nice To Haves

• Experience building services for physical devices (vehicles, phones, IoT)

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the architecture and delivery of backend services that broker and orchestrate API integrations across distributed systems.
• Design and implement reliable APIs and event-driven flows (REST/gRPC, webhooks, Pub/Sub), including rate limiting, retries, backoff, and circuit breakers, under guidance from senior engineers.
• Implement authentication and authorization for service-to-service and partner integrations (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, mTLS, JWT), and support secrets management and key rotation processes.
• Integrate services with enterprise infrastructure, identity, networking, and observability tooling; assist with secure network connectivity and private peering between environments as needed.
• Help define and monitor SLIs/SLOs, contribute to logging, tracing, and alerting setups, and participate in on-call rotations.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, following established build, deploy, and release standards.
• Collaborate with security, legal, privacy, enterprise architecture, and data teams to support compliance and robust end-to-end design.
• Participate in design and code reviews, and help maintain technical documentation and runbooks.
• Support product and integration teams in onboarding partners, including partner-facing contracts, SDKs, and sandbox/testing flows.

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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed