Staff Software Engineer - OTA Platform

About the role

You'll be a core contributor to the In-Vehicle OTA Platform, building the software that will keep Ford's Universal Electric Vehicle fleet up to date. Our OTA software update service is a Rust application responsible for orchestrating vehicle software updates, managing complex multi-stage lifecycles across download, verification, installation, and activation across many ECUs. Your work ships to real vehicles on real roads.

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.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years writing production Rust, or strong, demonstrable C++ expertise with a clear appetite to work in Rust.
• Strong command of async programming, including the Tokio runtime and concurrent system design.
• Solid Linux systems experience–you are comfortable developing, debugging, and operating software in Linux environments.
• Demonstrated 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.

Qualifications

• Experience with automotive systems, OTA software updates, or vehicle ECU communication protocols such as UDS, CAN, or LIN.
• Familiarity with Yocto/BitBake for embedded Linux image builds and cross-compilation.
• Background in serialization strategies and schema evolution for distributed systems.
• Cross-compilation experience for embedded or constrained targets.
• Experience packaging and distributing developer tooling to engineering teams.
• Experience in regulated industries where software reliability and traceability are required (automotive, medical, aerospace).
• Comfort working alongside AI coding agents and integrating AI-assisted workflows into day-to-day engineering.

Skills

• Strong command of async programming, including the Tokio runtime and concurrent system design.
• Experience with automotive systems, OTA software updates, or vehicle ECU communication protocols such as UDS, CAN, or LIN.
• Familiarity with Yocto/BitBake for embedded Linux image builds and cross-compilation.
• Background in serialization strategies and schema evolution for distributed systems.
• Cross-compilation experience for embedded or constrained targets.
• Experience packaging and distributing developer tooling to engineering teams.
• Experience in regulated industries where software reliability and traceability are required (automotive, medical, aerospace).
• Comfort working alongside AI coding agents and integrating AI-assisted workflows into day-to-day engineering.

Benefits

• 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.

Pay

This position is a leadership level 6 and ranges from $150,200-$283,500. 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.

Schedule

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.