Lead Engineer

Job Description JOB DESCRIPTION Job Description 1. BASIC JOB INFORMATION Position Title Lead Engineer Position Grade Lead Engineer (SG07) Location Chennai Department/Company Marketing, Sales & Service PDO Date of Request Nov 2025 Reports To LL6, Senior Engineering Manager, VMI Position to be filled by ASAP 2.ROLE DESCRIPTION AND SCOPE Role: - Lead Engineer (9+ years) responsible for the architecture, technical design, and delivery of a microservices ecosystem and a greenfield openstack platform for largescale modernization. - Accountable for the variable marketing incentive domain, driving modernization using MACH and 12factor principles to improve scalability, modularity, and timetomarket. - Owner for API design and the backend Spring Boot microservices suite on Google Cloud Platform, including integrations with Apigee and other cloud services. - Serve as a crossfunctional partner with Product Managers, Architects, DevOps, QA, and other stakeholders to define technical roadmaps and delivery plans. - Technical leader and mentor: set engineering practices (TDD/BDD, CI/CD, shiftleft testing), guide POCs, and ensure operational readiness and reliability. 3.KEY RESPONSIBILITIES / DELIVERABLES - Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing evolution of one or more microservice modules produce technical designs and implementation plans. - Assess the existing application footprint, identify gaps/risks, and recommend migration or modernization strategies for the target architecture. - Drive platform modernization initiatives and deliver measurable improvements in scalability, performance, and capacity. - Design and build reusable frameworks, libraries, and patterns that accelerate delivery and improve maintainability. - Develop and validate proofsofconcept for emerging technologies guide selected POCs into productiongrade solutions. - Establish and enforce API, coding, and architecture standards conduct code and architecture reviews. - Ensure platform reliability and resiliency by designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, and automated recoverability. - Own incident response and operational readiness activities, resolving production issues with minimal oversight and supporting oncall processes. - Produce and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and developer guides to support operations and onboarding. - Contribute to Ford's Product Driven Organization (PDO) goals by identifying opportunities to reduce crossteam dependencies and increase team autonomy. 4.NUMBER OF DIRECT SUBORDINATES EXPERIENCES / COMPETENCIES Education Qualification Bachelor's or Equivalent Number of Years of Experience Minimum 9+ years Leadership Skills - Excellent communication and interpersonal skills - Ability to work effectively in a remote/virtual work setting with other global team members - Proven facilitation skills - able to effectively drive discussion among diverse perspectives and reach a decision or recommendation - Effectively work with cross-functional teams across the organization - inside and outside of the technology and software organization Functional/Technical Skills - Senior, handson technical leader (9+ years) owning architecture, design decisions, and delivery for microservices platforms. - Mentor and coach engineers, conduct design/code reviews, and raise engineering standards across teams. - Collaborate with Product, Architecture, DevOps/SRE, Security, and QA translate business needs into technical requirements and build/evaluate POCs. - Champion modern engineering practices (TDD/BDD, CI/CD, shiftleft testing, 12factor / MACH principles). - Drive reliability and operational readiness: capacity planning, runbooks, incident response, and oncall support. - Deep expertise in Java/JEE and Spring Boot for microservices development. - Strong experience in API design, DomainDriven Design (DDD), and API gateway integration (Apigee) apply cloudnative patterns on Google Cloud Platform. - Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (GKE) familiarity with serverless and containerized deployments. - Messaging and eventdriven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Cloud Pub/Sub) and stream processing experience. - Data systems and persistence: RDBMS and NoSQL (Postgres/DB2, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis), polyglot persistence, data modeling and replication. - Concurrency, resiliency and performance: multithreading, scalability patterns (retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads, idempotency), observability/tracing, and CI/CD/DevOps tooling. Travel - As needed and flexible Other Preferred - RESPONSIBILITIES - Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing evolution of one or more microservice modules produce technical designs and implementation plans. - Assess the existing application footprint, identify gaps/risks, and recommend migration or modernization strategies for the target architecture. - Drive platform modernization initiatives and deliver measurable improvements in scalability, performance, and capacity. - Design and build reusable frameworks, libraries, and patterns that accelerate delivery and improve maintainability. - Develop and validate proofsofconcept for emerging technologies guide selected POCs into productiongrade solutions. - Establish and enforce API, coding, and architecture standards conduct code and architecture reviews. - Ensure platform reliability and resiliency by designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, and automated recoverability. - Own incident response and operational readiness activities, resolving production issues with minimal oversight and supporting oncall processes. - Produce and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and developer guides to support operations and onboarding. - Contribute to Ford's Product Driven Organization (PDO) goals by identifying opportunities to reduce crossteam dependencies and increase team autonomy. - Lead Engineer (9+ years) responsible for the architecture, technical design, and delivery of a microservices ecosystem and a greenfield openstack platform for largescale modernization. - Accountable for the variable marketing incentive domain, driving modernization using MACH and 12factor principles to improve scalability, modularity, and timetomarket. - Owner for API design and the backend Spring Boot microservices suite on Google Cloud Platform, including integrations with Apigee and other cloud services. - Serve as a crossfunctional partner with Product Managers, Architects, DevOps, QA, and other stakeholders to define technical roadmaps and delivery plans. - Technical leader and mentor: set engineering practices (TDD/BDD, CI/CD, shiftleft testing), guide POCs, and ensure operational readiness and reliability. QUALIFICATIONS EXPERIENCES / COMPETENCIES Education Qualification Bachelor's or Equivalent Number of Years of Experience Minimum 9+ years Leadership Skills - Excellent communication and interpersonal skills - Ability to work effectively in a remote/virtual work setting with other global team members - Proven facilitation skills - able to effectively drive discussion among diverse perspectives and reach a decision or recommendation - Effectively work with cross-functional teams across the organization - inside and outside of the technology and software organization