Software Engineer, Distributed Systems & Networking

Socket.dev; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; 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

You will contribute to the design, development, and operation of backend services supporting millions of vehicles globally. You'll help ensure seamless integration with existing infrastructure and support the team in delivering software that is reliable, high performance, and secure.

Responsibilities

What you'll do...

• Contribute to the architecture and delivery of backend services that broker and orchestrate API integrations across distributed systems.
• Design and implement reliable APIs and event-driven flows (REST/gRPC, webhooks, Pub/Sub), including rate limiting, retries, backoff, and circuit breakers, under guidance from senior engineers.
• Implement authentication and authorization for service-to-service and partner integrations (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, mTLS, JWT), and support secrets management and key rotation processes.
• Integrate services with enterprise infrastructure, identity, networking, and observability tooling; assist with secure network connectivity and private peering between environments as needed.
• Help define and monitor SLIs/SLOs, contribute to logging, tracing, and alerting setups, and participate in on-call rotations.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, following established build, deploy, and release standards.
• Collaborate with security, legal, privacy, enterprise architecture, and data teams to support compliance and robust end-to-end design.
• Participate in design and code reviews, and help maintain technical documentation and runbooks.
• Support product and integration teams in onboarding partners, including partner-facing contracts, SDKs, and sandbox/testing flows.

Qualifications

You'll have...

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Proficiency in one or more languages: Go, Java, or Python
• Working understanding of distributed systems communication patterns (REST/gRPC, asynchronous messaging via Pub/Sub, API-first design)
• Experience building and supporting scalable, available systems in production
• Good collaboration and communication skills across cross-functional teams
• Willingness to learn and grow technical leadership skills over time
• Nice to have: Experience building services for physical devices (vehicles, phones, IoT)

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 8 and ranges from $138,800-$232,700.
Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.

Visa sponsorship is 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.

This position is hybrid. Candidates who are in commuting distance to a Ford hub location may be required to be onsite four or more days per week.