Staff Software Engineer - OTA Platform
About The Position
Ford’s Electric Vehicles, Digital and Design (EVDD) team is charged with delivering the company’s vision of a fully electric transportation future. EVDD is customer-obsessed, entrepreneurial, and data-driven and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading customer experience for electric vehicle buyers and owners. You’ll join an agile team of doers pioneering our EV future by working collaboratively, staying focused on only what matters, and delivering excellence day in and day out. Join us to make positive change by helping build a better world where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams. In this position, you'll be a core contributor to the In-Vehicle OTA Platform, building the software that will keep Ford's Universal Electric Vehicle fleet up to date. Our OTA software update service is a Rust application responsible for orchestrating vehicle software updates, managing complex multi-stage lifecycles across download, verification, installation, and activation across many ECUs. Your work ships to real vehicles on real roads.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years writing production Rust, or strong, demonstrable C++ expertise with a clear appetite to work in Rust.
- Strong command of async programming, including the Tokio runtime and concurrent system design.
- Solid Linux systems experience–you are comfortable developing, debugging, and operating software in Linux environments.
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing state machines for distributed or embedded systems.
- Strong testing discipline: unit, integration, and mock-driven testing.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and modern build systems.
- Excellent written communication — you write documentation your teammates actually read.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with automotive systems, OTA software updates, or vehicle ECU communication protocols such as UDS, CAN, or LIN.
- Familiarity with Yocto/BitBake for embedded Linux image builds and cross-compilation.
- Background in serialization strategies and schema evolution for distributed systems.
- Cross-compilation experience for embedded or constrained targets.
- Experience packaging and distributing developer tooling to engineering teams.
- Experience in regulated industries where software reliability and traceability are required (automotive, medical, aerospace).
- Comfort working alongside AI coding agents and integrating AI-assisted workflows into day-to-day engineering.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the OTA software update engine.
- Design and implement reliable, safe update orchestration logic.
- Write production-quality async Rust with a focus on correctness, safety, and maintainability.
- Build and contribute to cutting-edge developer tooling that lets engineers create and manage software update deployments.
- Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, container infrastructure, and multi-target build systems.
- Participate in code review with a high signal-to-noise bar: focus on correctness and reliability.
- Collaborate across embedded firmware, vehicle software, and cloud infrastructure teams to coordinate update flows end-to-end.
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.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
