Staff Software Engineer & Tech Lead - Cloud & UI/API

Ford Motor; Dearborn (MI); Hybrid; USD 116,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental/Vision

Parental leave

Vehicle discount

Tuition assistance

PTO & holidays

Employee resource groups

Job summary

Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI is seeking a Software Supervisor to drive technical strategy and hands-on delivery across UI and backend services in a large-scale, cloud-native telematics platform. You will partner with product owners and engineering teams to shape direction, remove blockers, and write production code.

This leadership role emphasizes high autonomy, cross-team collaboration, and a quality-first engineering culture, with opportunities to influence architectural decisions and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 6+ years of professional software development experience, including backend development with Java and/or Kotlin and experience building services with Spring Boot.
• 3+ years of experience working with cloud platforms and infrastructure, including GCP, AWS, Azure, or equivalent cloud technologies.
• 2+ years of experience developing technical architecture, technical discovery, feasibility assessments, or technical assessment documentation used to support business or technical decision‑making.
• 1+ year of experience serving as a technical lead or leading technical delivery across multi‑team or cross‑functional software projects.
• 1+ year of frontend development experience using React, TypeScript, or a comparable modern UI framework.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical design and delivery for features spanning UI and backend services — from requirements discovery through production rollout.
• Act as technical lead on complex, multi‑team initiatives — break down cross‑cutting work into clear workstreams, sequence dependencies across teams, surface and resolve blockers proactively, and keep delivery on track against committed timelines without formal management authority.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for a project across its lifecycle — aligning multiple engineering teams, product owners, and architects around a single technical plan and keeping them in sync as the plan evolves.
• Identify delivery risk early (scope creep, unclear ownership, slipping dependencies) and drive mitigation — including making pragmatic trade‑off calls under time pressure.
• Partner with product managers, program managers, and other engineering teams to translate business/strategic goals into technical roadmaps; represent engineering in cross‑team design reviews and planning.
• Investigate and resolve complex, ambiguous production issues across distributed microservices — tracing problems through code, configuration, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud logs/observability tools to find true root cause (not just symptoms).
• Champion a quality‑first engineering culture: drive test automation strategy (unit, integration, BDD/acceptance), push for regression coverage on every fix, and mentor others on testing discipline.
• Evaluate and guide adoption of frameworks/library upgrades (e.g., major version migrations) across multiple services, anticipating and documenting subtle breaking‑change risks before they hit production.
• Author clear technical documentation and discovery/assessment briefs that non‑engineering stakeholders can use to make go/no‑go decisions.
• Self‑start into unfamiliar codebases/domains with minimal onboarding — read code, configs, pipelines, and docs to build context independently, then act.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Spring Boot

Cloud platforms

Technical leadership

React/TypeScript

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI is seeking a Software Supervisor to drive technical strategy and hands-on delivery across UI and backend services in a large-scale, cloud-native telematics platform. You will partner with product owners and engineering teams to shape direction, remove blockers, and write production code.

This leadership role emphasizes high autonomy, cross-team collaboration, and a quality-first engineering culture, with opportunities to influence architectural decisions and