Platform Engineer

Ford Ford · Auto · Dearborn, MI +1 · Enterprise Technology

This role is for a Platform Engineering Software Engineer focused on building and operating internal and external APIs, developer tooling, and automation to enhance engineering team efficiency and reliability within the Ford Motor Credit Company. The engineer will design secure, well-documented services and CLI/SDK templates, implement strong testing and CI/CD practices, and embed observability and operability in a cloud-native environment. The position involves collaborating with product and platform teams to standardize patterns, reduce operational toil, and drive adoption of platform solutions.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and build internal and customer-facing APIs and services that are secure, reliable, and well-documented.
  2. Create developer tools and platform services that improve developer experience (DX): templates, CLIs, libraries, service scaffolding, automation.
  3. Apply engineering best practices: test-driven development, code review, CI, and safe deployment patterns.
  4. Engineer for operability: structured logging, metrics/tracing, health endpoints, and actionable alerts.
  5. Collaborate with platform and product teams to standardize patterns (authn/authz, secrets, configuration, resilience, versioning).

Skills

Required

  • Strong software engineering experience delivering production services/APIs (design, implementation, testing, and operations).
  • Proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Java, Go, C#, Python, TypeScript) and modern API practices.
  • Experience with API design and lifecycle management (versioning, backward compatibility, pagination, error modeling).
  • Strong testing discipline (unit/component/integration tests) and comfort refactoring safely.
  • Working knowledge of cloud-native delivery: containers, CI/CD, and operating services in a cloud environment.
  • Ability to debug across layers (application, runtime, platform) using logs/metrics/traces.

Nice to have

  • Experience building and maintaining platform APIs (internal “product” mindset: usability, docs, support, adoption).
  • Experience with event-driven and asynchronous patterns (queues, pub/sub), reliability, and idempotency.
  • Security experience: OAuth/OIDC concepts, least privilege, threat modeling, input validation.
  • Experience improving reliability using SLOs and reducing toil through automation.
  • Experience with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code in partnership with platform/SRE teams.