Software Engineering Manager

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

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 Credit is looking for a Director of Software Engineering to lead our Platform Integration function. This role is a critical function at the heart of several modernization efforts, including establishing an Industrial Loan Bank, a Core Lending Modernization program, and the implementation of a centralized Fleet Management Billing and Payments solution. As such, this is a highly technical, cross-cutting role responsible for establishing the patterns, standards, and operational discipline that allow dozens of engineering teams to integrate reliably - through well-governed APIs, a coherent event-driven architecture, and a shared set of integration templates and standards.
• This leader owns the organization's Orchestration platform, including our GraphQL implementation, Service API strategy, and Event Registry. You will work directly with 10-25 teams to support the adoption of these patterns and help them evaluate their designs and delivered systems against our maturity model through a weekly Production Readiness and Review Council, that you will also lead.
• This role is inherently cross-team: success is measured not by any single system owned, but by the consistency, reliability, and throughput this leader enables across the broader engineering organization - all channeled through and dependent on the health, scalability, and governance of the Orchestration platform.
• The candidate will have a deep understanding of GraphQL, the Apollo platform, Platform Thinking, Domain-Driven Design, Product Mindset, and Cloud-Native Distributed Systems, paired with hands-on SRE instincts for deployment, monitoring, telemetry, observability, and recovery. The role will partner with product engineering teams, infrastructure and SRE, and developer experience and AI teams to ensure integration is done consistently, safely, and at speed - while providing guidance and coaching on building services and platform capabilities through high-quality engineering and operational practices.
• The position is supported by the Ford Credit VP of Platform Engineering and will support 25-40 team members in North America and India.

What You’ll Do...

• Create and drive an organization-wide strategy for API creation, versioning, governance, and lifecycle management across all engineering teams
• Own and evolve the event registry, establishing clear standards for event schemas, ownership, discoverability, and versioning as part of the enterprise event-driven architecture
• Partner with teams across the organization to design, socialize, and continuously improve integration patterns, reference architectures, templates, and implementation standards
• Chair a weekly Production Readiness and Review Council, establishing clear go-live criteria and holding teams accountable to operational, security, and reliability standards before and after launch
• Champion observability and operational excellence as first-class engineering concerns - advancing standards for monitoring, telemetry, tracing, alerting, and incident response across the platform
• Drive continuous improvement in system resilience and recovery practices, ensuring teams design for failure, degrade gracefully, and learn systematically from incidents
• Set organizational standards and guardrails for AI-assisted development and rapid prototyping, balancing innovation and developer velocity with security, quality, and maintainability
• Deliver amazing experiences for internal engineering teams guided by Lean principles
• Build a learning organization powered by DevOps and SRE principles
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement through mentoring, feedback, and metrics
• Ensure APIs, event contracts, integration templates, and tooling are built with a product mindset to enable adoption across teams
• Create shared solutions with enterprise partners where possible, avoiding duplicated integration effort across the organization
• Support teams in capturing metrics and assessing portfolio health, setting clear and measurable quality, reliability, and security goals for the organization
• Evaluate regulatory concerns from a development lens and augment strategy to reduce audit efforts
• Assist in the creation, adoption, and support of standards and conventions in the engineering organization
• Mentor and develop team members

You’ll have...

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of relevant work experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems
• 5+ years of experience supporting cloud-native applications on GCP, AWS, or Azure
• 5+ years of experience designing, governing, or managing APIs at scale (REST, gRPC, and/or GraphQL) across multiple consuming teams
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with event-driven architecture, including messaging/streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, GCP PubSub, event brokers) and event schema management
• 5+ years of experience building or scaling observability practices (monitoring, telemetry, tracing, alerting) in production environments
• Demonstrated experience establishing engineering standards, templates, or reference architectures adopted across multiple teams
• Experience leading production readiness reviews, architecture review boards, or similar governance forums
• Experience building platforms in regulated industries for various programs (e.g., PCI, SOC1|2, SOX, ECOA)

Even better, you may have...

• Hands-on familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and practices, with a point of view on responsible adoption at scale
• Experience defining or operating an event/schema registry in a large, multi-team organization
• Highly effective in working with other technical specialists, architects, Product Managers, UI/UX Designers and business partners
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Strong oral and written communication skills, with experience facilitating cross-team technical forums
• Strong teamwork and interpersonal skills
• Strong program management and strategy deployment experience

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 leadership level 5 and ranges from $141,700-$268,300.

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 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.