Senior Full Stack Software Developer

Ford Motor Company

Full Stack Senior Software Developer at Ford focusing on root cause analysis within automotive infotainment systems. Leading investigations and ensuring system-wide stability in production environments.

Posted 6/17/2026full-timeDearborn • Missouri • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudJavaScriptMicroservicesReactReduxRTOSSDLC

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead Complex System Investigations: Direct the technical root-cause analysis, triage, isolation, and resolution of critical, hard-to-reproduce software failures and bug reports occurring intermittently in production environments.
Deep-Dive Low-Level Diagnostics: Master the investigation of system logs, core dumps, memory leaks, and corruptions to trace transient defects, multi-threaded bottlenecks, IPC deadlocks, and system crashes across compute-constrained ECU platforms.
Target IVI & Back-End Triage: Isolate complex software defects primarily originating within the IVI platform, tracing dependencies through microservices and external back-end APIs that interface with the vehicle.
AI-Driven Diagnostics & Knowledge Training: Utilize advanced AI tools, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to accelerate trace parsing, while documenting analytical approaches to train diagnostic models for improved automated insights.
Vehicle Communication & Protocol Analysis: Analyze vehicle bus communications using CAN, Ethernet, and other automotive protocols to isolate data mismatches, timing issues, and trace signal transmission across distributed ECUs.
Diagnostic Tools & DTC Tracking: Utilize specialized automotive diagnostic tools to read, interpret, and resolve Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), tracking issues from electronic symptoms to specific source code line failures.
In-Vehicle Validation & Testing: Conduct direct vehicle-level validation, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, and physical bench setups to verify software behavior, replicate production artifacts, and guarantee real-time reliability and performance on target embedded hardware.
Manage Polyglot, Full-Stack Multi-Component Ecosystems: Leverage broad technical mastery spanning high-level web frameworks (JavaScript/React HMI), backend services, databases, and low-level native embedded software (C/C++) to implement, optimize, navigate, and trace bugs across diverse repositories and subsystems.
Source Code & Documentation Mastery: Audit, optimize, implement, and maintain critical codebases for embedded platforms while authoring detailed technical documentation, architectural specifications, and long-term engineering blueprints.
Modern SDLC & Technical Governance: Operate within modern, scaled SDLC and Agile/Scrum environments to contribute to structural architectural decisions, review high-level designs (HLD), establish strict acceptance criteria, and drive software quality and maintainability.
Feature Dependency & Lifecycle Management: Define and manage complex feature dependencies, blockers, and risk registers across HMI, services, platform components, and validation to prevent software regressions across program lifecycles.
Cross-Functional & Cross-Cultural Alignment: Act as the core technical lead for multi-project defect investigations, driving technical consensus across internal global teams, hardware engineering, validation, product owners, Tier-1 suppliers, and third-party OS providers (such as QNX).
Team Mentorship & Quality Leadership: Elevate overall engineering capabilities by leading comprehensive code reviews, establishing technical onboarding processes, mentoring other engineers, and conducting core technical interviews.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related technical STEM field.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a core focus on complex architectural development and full lifecycle ownership.
8+ years of expert-level experience tracing, debugging, and optimizing native software applications using C/C++ within real-time operating systems (RTOS) like QNX.
8+ years of hands-on experience designing and debugging multi-layered full-stack runtimes, explicitly combining asynchronous web frameworks (JavaScript, React, Redux, WebSockets) with low-level native embedded subsystems.
6+ years of dedicated engineering experience within the Automotive Infotainment (IVI) and Human-Machine Interface (HMI) domains.
5+ years of practical experience using advanced automotive vehicle network simulators and diagnostic tools—specifically VectorCAN — for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), bench, and in-vehicle validation testing.
Documented mastery in reverse-engineering source code and dissecting system logs, core dumps, memory management tools (e.g., Valgrind), and physical CAN data captures to triage, isolate, and resolve transient software crashes, multi-threaded bottlenecks, and memory corruptions.
Proven expertise diagnosing bugs that span across local IVI application layers, downstream ECUs, and connected cloud/back-end infrastructures.
Proven track record operating as a Technical Lead or Anchor within modern scaled Agile/Scrum environments, including leading technical code reviews and authoring High-Level Designs (HLD).
Experience with automotive communication protocols (e.g., CAN, Ethernet), MQTT, IPC, Valgrind, SonarQube, GTest, Git/GitHub Actions, SDLC and agile methodologies.
Experience with software optimization for performance and memory constraints.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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.

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Hard Skills & Tools

C/C++JavaScriptReactReduxWebSocketsRTOSHIL testingdebuggingsource code optimizationmemory management

Soft Skills

technical leadershipmentorshipcross-functional collaborationproblem-solvingcommunication