Principal Software Engineer

Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced and visionary Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership and strategic direction within our highly collaborative software delivery team. Lead the development and execution of Ford’s C360 platform Ingestion and Consumer Web Services (CWS) strategy, development and relevance. This role is critical in bringing all customer related data sources into the Data Platform and delivering transformed customer knowledge and insights to the enterprise through real-time interfaces and data solutions. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in software engineering, data engineering, cloud platforms, and product-centric thinking, coupled with strong leadership and execution capabilities. The candidate also should have experience and understanding of customer data management and activation of the same for business use cases.

This role is crucial for driving the architecture, development, and deployment of cutting-edge technologies to the cloud, as well as fostering innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our business.

Responsibilities

• Architect and Lead Development: Drive the architectural design, development, and delivery of complex, scalable, and resilient Java microservices deployed to cloud environments.
• Technical Strategy & Roadmapping: Collaborate with product managers, product designers, and other engineering leaders to define technical roadmaps, evaluate new technologies, and establish best practices that align with business objectives and anticipate future challenges.
• Mentorship & Coaching: Provide technical mentorship, guidance, and coaching to software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, clean code, and test-driven development (TDD).
• Quality Assurance Leadership: Champion and lead the implementation of advanced automated testing strategies, including unit, integration, functional, and performance tests, ensuring high-quality software delivery and minimizing regression defects.
• Operational Excellence: Oversee and optimize continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, improving automation, quality gates, and deployment processes based on past learnings and industry best practices.
• Production Incident Management: Act as a technical escalation point for critical production issues, leading root cause analysis, implementing preventative measures, and ensuring robust system reliability and performance.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Management and Product Design to translate complex business requirements into technical solutions, advocating for technical feasibility and long-term maintainability.
• Innovation & Adoption: Proactively identify, evaluate, and champion the adoption of new technologies, tools, and methodologies that can significantly enhance product capabilities, developer productivity, and system performance.
• System Resilience & Scalability: Design and implement solutions that ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and scalability for critical systems, understanding the non-functional requirements at an architectural level.
  
  
  

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field; an advanced degree is a plus.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with a significant portion in a lead or principal role, preferably within the mobility or a highly distributed systems environment.
• 5+ years of Proven Technical Leadership & Architectural Expertise: Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, define architectural patterns, and guide complex projects from conception to production.
• 5+ years of Deep Expertise in Cloud-Native Development: Extensive experience with RESTful Web Services, microservices architecture, and cloud-native application development using Spring Boot or Java EE Framework, deployed on platforms like PCF, AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• 3+ years of Advanced Testing & Automation: Expert-level knowledge and practical experience with automated testing concepts, tools, and frameworks ( e.g., JUnit, Mockito, Selenium, Cucumber, Pact).
• Expertise in GCP (CloudRun, APIGEE, PostgreSQL, Dataflow, Pub/Sub), and other Modern Data Stack technologies.