Senior Rust Engineer — OTA Platform & Vehicle Software

Ford; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Parental leave

Family care programs

Vehicle discount

Tuition assistance

Employee resource groups

Volunteer time off

Paid holidays

Onsite four days/week

Job summary

Ford Motor Company is seeking a senior software engineer to join the In-Vehicle OTA Platform team in California. You will build the Rust-based OTA update engine and coordinate complex update lifecycles across ECUs, drivers, and the cloud, delivering reliable, production-grade software that ships to real vehicles.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years of software experience, strong Rust or C++, and a solid Linux background.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years writing production Rust or strong C++ expertise.
• Strong command of async programming, including the Tokio runtime and concurrent system design.
• Solid Linux systems experience and ability to develop, debug, and operate software in Linux environments.
• Experience designing and implementing state machines for distributed or embedded systems.
• Strong testing discipline: unit, integration, and mock-driven testing.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and modern build systems.
• Excellent written communication — you write documentation your teammates actually read.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the OTA software update engine.
• Design and implement reliable, safe update orchestration logic.
• Write production-quality async Rust with a focus on correctness, safety, and maintainability.
• Build and contribute to cutting-edge developer tooling that lets engineers create and manage software update deployments.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, container infrastructure, and multi-target build systems.
• Participate in code review with a high signal-to-noise bar: focus on correctness and reliability.
• Collaborate across embedded firmware, vehicle software, and cloud infrastructure teams to coordinate update flows end-to-end.

Skills

Rust

C++

Async programming

Linux

State machines

Testing discipline

CI/CD pipelines

Documentation

Education

Bachelors in Computer Science/Software Engineering

Tools

Tokio runtime

YOCTO/BitBake

CAN/UDS/LIN

Job description

Ford Motor Company is seeking a senior software engineer to join the In-Vehicle OTA Platform team in California. You will build the Rust-based OTA update engine and coordinate complex update lifecycles across ECUs, drivers, and the cloud, delivering reliable, production-grade software that ships to real vehicles.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years of software experience, strong Rust or C++, and a solid Linux background.