Director, Platform Integration & API Strategy

Ford Credit; California (MO); On-site; USD 142,000 - 268,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage (health)

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Parental leave

Tuition assistance

Vehicle discount

Paid time off

Holidays

Job summary

Ford Credit is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead Platform Integration. This role anchors modernization efforts and drives API governance, event-driven patterns, and a scalable orchestration platform across 10-25 teams in North America and India.

You will own the GraphQL implementation, guide teams through maturity models, and champion observability, reliability, security, and rapid, safe delivery. This leadership role reports to the VP of Platform Engineering.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years designing, building, and operating distributed systems.
• 5+ years cloud-native app experience on AWS/GCP/Azure.
• 5+ years API governance at scale (REST, gRPC, GraphQL).
• 3+ years event-driven architecture with Kafka or similar.
• 5+ years building observability practices in production.
• Experience leading cross-team governance forums.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Create and drive an organization-wide API strategy across all engineering teams.
• Own and evolve the event registry, schemas, ownership, and versioning.
• Lead pattern adoption and template standards across teams.
• Chair a weekly Production Readiness and Review Council for go-live criteria.
• Champion observability, monitoring, and incident response standards.
• Drive resilience and recovery practices across the platform.
• Set guardrails for AI-assisted development and rapid prototyping.
• Deliver experiences for internal engineering teams guided by Lean/DevOps principles.
• Mentor and develop team members.
• Ensure APIs, event contracts, and tooling have a product mindset.

Skills

GraphQL

Apollo Platform

Platform Thinking

Domain-Driven Design

Product Mindset

Cloud-Native Distributed Systems

SRE Principles

Observability

Leadership

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field

Tools

GraphQL

Kafka

GCP

AWS

Azure

Job description

Ford Credit is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead Platform Integration. This role anchors modernization efforts and drives API governance, event-driven patterns, and a scalable orchestration platform across 10-25 teams in North America and India.

You will own the GraphQL implementation, guide teams through maturity models, and champion observability, reliability, security, and rapid, safe delivery. This leadership role reports to the VP of Platform Engineering.