Software Engineer, Distributed Systems & Networking

Overview As a Backend Software Engineer at Ford, you will help design, develop, and operate scalable backend services that connect millions of vehicles. You’ll work within a distributed system environment to deliver reliable, high-performance APIs and event-driven flows, contributing to secure and seamless integrations. The role sits at the intersection of architecture, development, and production support, offering growth toward technical leadership. You’ll collaborate across teams to drive robust design, security, and observability. This is a hands-on opportunity to impact connected-vehicle infrastructure in a global, hybrid setting. Compensation / BenefitsImmediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverageFlexible family care daysPaid parental leave and ramp-up programsTuition assistanceVehicle discount program for employees and familyPaid time off and holidays ResponsibilitiesContribute to architecture and delivery of backend services that broker and orchestrate API integrations across distributed systemsDesign and implement reliable APIs and event-driven flows with resilience patterns (rate limiting, retries, backoff, circuit breakers)Implement authentication/authorization for service-to-service and partner integrations and support secrets managementIntegrate services with enterprise infrastructure, networking, and observability tooling; assist with secure connectivityDefine and monitor SLIs/SLOs; contribute to logging, tracing, and alerting; participate in on-call rotationsContribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code; adhere to build, deploy, and release standardsCollaborate with security, legal, privacy, enterprise architecture, and data teams to support compliance and end-to-end designParticipate in design/code reviews and maintain technical documentation and runbooksSupport product/integration teams onboarding partners, including SDKs and sandbox/testing flows Key requirements3+ years of backend software engineering experienceProficiency in Go, Java, or PythonUnderstanding of distributed systems patterns (REST/gRPC, asynchronous messaging, API-first design)Experience building and supporting scalable, available production systemsStrong collaboration and communication across cross-functional teamsWillingness to grow towards technical leadershipNice to have: experience building services for physical devices (vehicles, IoT)collaborationcommunicationcross-functional teamworkGo, Java, or PythonREST and gRPCasynchronous messaging (Pub/Sub)