Software and AI Engineer

Ford; Dearborn (MI); Remote; USD 100,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Parental leave

Tuition assistance

Vehicle discount

Job summary

Ford Motor Credit Company seeks an experienced backend engineer to support the Pinnacle Loan Originations platform, spanning mainframe COBOL/DB2/CICS and Java/Spring microservices on GCP. You will enable AI tooling and robust agent workflows, ensuring auditability and provenance throughout the money-path.

The role emphasizes building deterministic backends in Java/Kotlin, OCI-like ADRs, and scalable MCP integrations within a multi-tier cloud environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production-grade backend systems.
• Experience delivering AI-enabled applications in production.

Responsibilities

• Read and understand the whole stack; diagnose production issues across mainframe, Java/Spring, and Cloud Run.
• Design and operate MCP tools layer with least-privilege per-call auditing.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Java

Kotlin

TypeScript

Spring Boot

Mainframe COBOL

Cloud Run

GCP

Knowledge graphs

Vector search

Splunk

Education

BS/MS in CS/IS or equivalent

Tools

DB2

PostgreSQL

REST/OpenAPI

CI/CD

Job description

We made history and now we work to transform the future – for our customers, our communities and our families. You'll see your work on the road every day, helping people move freely and pursue their dreams. At Ford, you can build more than vehicles. Come build what matters.

The Ford Motor Credit Company team helps put people behind the wheels of great Ford and Lincoln vehicles. By partnering with dealerships, we provide financing, personalized service and professional expertise to thousands of dealers and millions of customers in over one hundred countries around the world.

In this position...

• Ford Motor Credit Company's Pinnacle Loan Originations platform underwrites and funds a significant share of the vehicles Ford sells worldwide. It is a mission-critical, multi-tier system: a mainframe core (COBOL, DB2, CICS) that executes the money-path decisioning, a Java/Spring services tier that orchestrates business workflows, GCP Cloud Run microservices at the digital edge, and Splunk-driven observability across the estate.
• We are building an AI enablement layer on top of this platform — a set of production capabilities that make Pinnacle faster to operate, easier to debug, and more discoverable to the engineers and analysts who depend on it.

What you'll do...

• Read the whole stack, then change it.Diagnose production issues across the mainframe (COBOL, DB2, CICS), the Java/Spring services tier, and Cloud Run microservices. Ship the fix on the money-pathandthe corresponding improvement to agent tooling and knowledge substrate in the same change set.
• Design and operate the MCP tools layer.Build least-privilege, per-call-audited MCP servers over DB2, Splunk, and GCP. Provenance, PII handling.
• Build production multi-agent workflows on Google ADK— SequentialAgent and LoopAgent compositions, creating and managing Agent workflows, including escalation-containment patterns — for Splunk → DB2 → GCP error triage, ADR authoring, and originations debugging.
• Own the knowledge graph and retrieval work end-to-end.Model the loan originations ontology (VIN, dealer, offer, program eligibility, environment topology). Implement hybrid vector + graph retrieval. Every RAG-produced answer must be defensible under audit.
• Ship deterministic backend services in Java/Kotlin + Spring Boot on GCP— the audit envelope, provenance store, and human-in-the-loop review surfaces where non-determinism is unacceptable.
• Author ADRs in ADR-driven-development, OKF business-logic documents, skill files, and Splunk saved-search catalogs. Pair with teammates on the hard debugging sessions. The write-up is part of 'done.'
• Track mean time from 'agent cannot handle this' to 'agent handles this autonomously,' and publish the trend monthly.
• Create evaluations and an evaluation runner for all AI tools and agents built by you and the team.
• Publish, monthly, the change types you've made cheaper — mean time from 'agent doesn't know this' to 'agent handles it autonomously.'
• Automate test-case generation, evaluation, and grading for both brownfield and greenfield applications, ensuring coverage, repeatability, and measurable quality improvements.

You'll have...

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field — or equivalent professional experience.
• 7+ yearsbuilding and operating production-grade backend systems as a hands-on engineer.
• 5+ yearsin Python and Java (Kotlin, TypeScript a plus).
• Atleast 1 year of experience inshipping AI-enabled applications in production — agent frameworks, retrieval systems, or LLM-backed services.
• Demonstrated experience with agent orchestration frameworks —Google ADK, LangGraph, LangChain, or comparable.
• Practical experience implementingMCP (Model Context Protocol)tool integrations, agent communication patterns, and AI observability.
• Working experience withvector search and hybrid retrieval, and with knowledge graphs or GraphRAG.
• Strong backend fundamentals: Spring Boot, relational databases (PostgreSQL, DB2, or similar) including query and schema design, REST/OpenAPI, TDD, modern CI/CD.
• Production experience onGoogle Cloud Platform(Vertex AI, Cloud Run, BigQuery) or an equivalent cloud.
• Comfort operating in complex, multi-tier, legacy-integrated environments where change control and auditability matter.

Even Better you'll have...

• Semantic technologies, ontology engineering, or graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, or similar).
• Experience integrating with mainframe systems (COBOL, DB2 for z/OS, CICS) or comparable long-lived transactional cores.
• Splunk SPL proficiency, including saved-search and dashboard authoring on large indexes.
• Event-driven architectures (Pub/Sub, Kafka); containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply!

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage

Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more

Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more

Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases

Tuition assistance

Established and active employee resource groups

Paid time off for individual and team community service

A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day

Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

This position is a salary grade 5 and ranges from $68,300-$114,800., This position is a salary grade 6 and ranges from $85,400-$143,200., This position is a salary grade 7 and ranges from $99,600-$166,600., This position is a salary grade 8 and ranges from $115,000-$192,900.

For more information on salary and benefits, https://fordcareers.co/GSR

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.

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