Staff Software Engineer - Ota Platform

Ford Ford · Auto · Palo Alto, CA +1 · PD Operations and Quality

Staff Software Engineer for Ford's Electric Vehicles, Digital and Design (EVDD) team, focusing on the In-Vehicle OTA Platform. The role involves owning and evolving the OTA software update engine, designing reliable and safe update orchestration logic, writing production-quality async Rust, and building developer tooling. Collaboration with embedded firmware, vehicle software, and cloud infrastructure teams is key. The position requires strong experience in async Rust, Linux systems, and state machine design for distributed or embedded systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own and evolve the OTA software update engine.
  2. Design and implement reliable, safe update orchestration logic.
  3. Write production-quality async Rust with a focus on correctness, safety, and maintainability.
  4. Build and contribute to cutting-edge developer tooling that lets engineers create and manage software update deployments.
  5. Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, container infrastructure, and multi-target build systems.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • 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
  • 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

Nice to have

  • 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

What the JD emphasized

  • production Rust
  • async Rust
  • correctness
  • safety
  • reliability