Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Join us at the forefront of Ford's digital transformation. The Industrial System Analytics team is solving some of the company's most challenging problems across Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Quality and Product Development, delivering AI/ML-driven applications and insights. This is your opportunity to architect the future, mentor the present, and code the backbone of Ford's Industrial System.

In this position...

As a Principal Software Engineer within the Global Industrial System Analytics organization, you will be a hands-on technical leader delivering working software. You will be responsible for design, development, and optimization of complex solutions for the Industrial System. You will solve complex, large-scale software engineering problems and build highly available, performant, and cost-effective solutions that power Ford's transformation of the Industrial System into a data-first, Analytics and AI-enabled organization.

While not a people management role, you will actively contribute to hiring, onboarding, and mentoring top-tier engineering talent and act as a technical bar-raiser across the organization. This is an opportunity to leave your technical mark on a large team, influence team direction without management overhead, and help shape a high-performance engineering culture focused on secure, scalable, reliable and efficient software.

Although this is listed as a remote position, we have a strong preference for a candidate who is available to work onsite in our Dearborn, MI office four days/ week. Relocation assistance may be available for qualified candidates.

Responsibilities

What you'll do...

Technical Execution & Hands-On Delivery

• Lead the design and development of critical ISA platform features, complex application implementation, and write and drive reusable components across ISA
• Write production-grade code, perform system integration, and contribute directly to codebases to unblock teams and raise the engineering bar
• Drive performance tuning, reliability engineering, and capacity planning

Engineering Leadership & Mentorship

• Lead by example in the areas of CI/CD, DevSecOps, infrastructure as code, and automated testing
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and informal technical leadership

Innovation & Proof-of-Concepts

• Lead experimentation and prototyping efforts for emerging technologies and new capabilities and efficiencies (example appropriate use of LLM for code generation)
• Translate non-functional requirements (e.g., security, scalability, compatibility, reliability) into actionable solutions
• Validate new technologies and patterns for scalability and performance prior to adoption with reference implementation

Industrial System Architecture & Engineering

• Design and develop core ISA platform components across the Industrial system, supporting integration with the enterprise data platform and IT source systems
• Leverage GCP-native services (Cloud Run, Cloud Build, Pub/Sub, IAM, Secret Manager, etc.) to enhance security and automation
• Design and promote modular code structures, service boundaries, test-driven development and decoupled architecture patterns
• Establish and maintain high standards for operations excellence across applications, driving the right technologies for the right service level agreements
• Ensure application architecture is aligned with Enterprise architecture

Technical Debt Management & Platform Maturity

• Identify and address technical debt aligned with Enterprise and GDIA technology transitions, balancing delivery with application health and maintainability
• Prioritize and drive modernization efforts that unlock developer productivity and efficiency

Cross-Functional Collagboration

• Work closely with architects (e.g. Enterprise architects, Data platform architects), data platform principal engineers, AI Platform engineers, product managers, data scientists, security teams, and business stakeholders to ensure alignment with organizational goals
• Translate complex technical concepts into actionable, well-communicated engineering plans

Qualifications

You'll have...

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including deep hands-on experience building and operating large-scale systems. Other skills to include:

• Expertise in one or more programming languages, Python or Java preferred, on large scale platforms

• Knowledge of DevSecOps Tools: GitHub Actions, GCP Cloud Build or Tekton, Terraform, SonarQube, etc.

• Experience with Cloud Architecture (preferably GCP): Modular Microservices, REST APIs and Serverless platforms like Cloud Run and Cloud Functions

• 5+ years of experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives

Even better, you may have...

• Master's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering or related field
• GCP Professional Certifications (e.g. Professional Cloud Developer, Cloud Architect)