Lead Engineer

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 open‑stack platform for large‑scale modernization.
• Accountable for the variable marketing incentive domain, driving modernization using MACH and 12‑factor principles to improve scalability, modularity, and time‑to‑market.
• 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 cross‑functional 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, shift‑left 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 proofs‑of‑concept for emerging technologies; guide selected POCs into production‑grade 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 on‑call 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 cross‑team dependencies and increase team autonomy.

4.  NUMBER OF DIRECT SUBORDINATES

0

 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, hands‑on 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, shift‑left testing, 12‑factor / MACH principles).
• Drive reliability and operational readiness: capacity planning, runbooks, incident response, and on‑call support.
• Deep expertise in Java/JEE and Spring Boot for microservices development.
• Strong experience in API design, Domain‑Driven Design (DDD), and API gateway integration (Apigee); apply cloud‑native patterns on Google Cloud Platform.
• Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (GKE); familiarity with serverless and containerized deployments.
• Messaging and event‑driven 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: multi‑threading, 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 proofs‑of‑concept for emerging technologies; guide selected POCs into production‑grade 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 on‑call 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 cross‑team dependencies and increase team autonomy.
• Lead Engineer (9+ years) responsible for the architecture, technical design, and delivery of a microservices ecosystem and a greenfield open‑stack platform for large‑scale modernization.
• Accountable for the variable marketing incentive domain, driving modernization using MACH and 12‑factor principles to improve scalability, modularity, and time‑to‑market.
• 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 cross‑functional 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, shift‑left testing), guide POCs, and ensure operational readiness and reliability.

Qualifications

 EXPERIENCES / COMPETENCIES 

Education QualificationBachelor's or EquivalentNumber of Years of ExperienceMinimum 9+ yearsLeadership 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

---