Backend Engineer — Distributed Systems for Global Vehicle APIs

Socket.dev; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 139,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Parental leave & family care programs

Adoption and surrogacy benefits

Vehicle discount program

Tuition assistance

Employee resource groups

Paid time off for community service

Paid holidays

Job summary

Ford Motor Company in the United States is seeking a backend engineer to design, build, and operate services powering millions of vehicles. You will help ensure reliability, high performance, and security while integrating with existing infrastructure.

The role emphasizes API design (REST/gRPC), authentication, observability, and collaboration with security, privacy, legal, enterprise architecture, and data teams. This is a hybrid position with growth opportunities in technical leadership.

Qualifications

• 3+ years backend software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or Python.
• Understanding of REST/gRPC, Pub/Sub, and API-first design.
• Experience building scalable production systems.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration.
• Willingness to grow technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to architecture and delivery of backend services.
• Design reliable APIs and event-driven flows (REST/gRPC, webhooks, Pub/Sub).
• Implement authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, mTLS, JWT) and secrets management.
• Integrate services with enterprise infrastructure, networking, and observability tooling; assist with secure connectivity.
• Define and monitor SLIs/SLOs; contribute to logging, tracing, and alerting; on-call rotations.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code following standards.
• Collaborate with security, legal, privacy, enterprise architecture, and data teams for compliance.
• Participate in design and code reviews; maintain docs and runbooks.
• Support onboarding partners with SDKs and sandbox/testing flows.

Skills

Backend experience

Go/Java/Python

Distributed systems

APIs/REST-gRPC

Team collaboration

Willingness to grow leadership

IoT/vehicle experience

Job description

Ford Motor Company in the United States is seeking a backend engineer to design, build, and operate services powering millions of vehicles. You will help ensure reliability, high performance, and security while integrating with existing infrastructure.

The role emphasizes API design (REST/gRPC), authentication, observability, and collaboration with security, privacy, legal, enterprise architecture, and data teams. This is a hybrid position with growth opportunities in technical leadership.