Lead Engineer

Job Description

Job Description JOB DESCRIPTION BASIC JOB INFORMATION Position Title Lead Engineer Position Grade Lead Engineer (SG07) Location Chennai Department/Company Marketing, Sales & Service PDO Date of Request Nov 2025 Reports To LL6, Senior Engineering Manager, VMI Position to be filled by ASAP ROLE DESCRIPTION AND SCOPE Role: Lead Engineer (9+ years) responsible for the architecture, technical design, and delivery of a microservices ecosystem and a greenfield open?stack platform for large?scale modernization. Accountable for the variable marketing incentive domain, driving modernization using MACH and 12?factor principles to improve scalability, modularity, and time?to?market. Owner for API design and the backend Spring Boot microservices suite on Google Cloud Platform, including integrations with Apigee and other cloud services. Serve as a cross?functional partner with Product Managers, Architects, DevOps, QA, and other stakeholders to define technical roadmaps and delivery plans. Technical leader and mentor: set engineering practices (TDD/BDD, CI/CD, shift?left testing), guide POCs, and ensure operational readiness and reliability. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES / DELIVERABLES Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing evolution of one or more microservice modules; produce technical designs and implementation plans. Assess the existing application footprint, identify gaps/risks, and recommend migration or modernization strategies for the target architecture. Drive platform modernization initiatives and deliver measurable improvements in scalability, performance, and capacity. Design and build reusable frameworks, libraries, and patterns that accelerate delivery and improve maintainability. Develop and validate proofs?of?concept for emerging technologies; guide selected POCs into production?grade solutions. Establish and enforce API, coding, and architecture standards; conduct code and architecture reviews. Ensure platform reliability and resiliency by designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, and automated recoverability. Own incident response and operational readiness activities, resolving production issues with minimal oversight and supporting on?call processes. Produce and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and developer guides to support operations and onboarding. Contribute to Ford?s Product Driven Organization (PDO) goals by identifying opportunities to reduce cross?team dependencies and increase team autonomy. NUMBER OF DIRECT SUBORDINATES 0 Experiences / Competencies Education Qualification Bachelor?s or Equivalent Number of Years of Experience Minimum 9+ years Leadership Skills Excellent communication and interpersonal skills Ability to work effectively in a remote/virtual work setting with other global team members Proven facilitation skills - able to effectively drive discussion among diverse perspectives and reach a decision or recommendation Effectively work with cross-functional teams across the organization ? inside and outside of the technology and software organization Functional/Technical Skills Senior, hands?on technical leader (9+ years) owning architecture, design decisions, and delivery for microservices platforms. Mentor and coach engineers, conduct design/code reviews, and raise engineering standards across teams. Collaborate with Product, Architecture, DevOps/SRE, Security, and QA; translate business needs into technical requirements and build/evaluate POCs. Champion modern engineering practices (TDD/BDD, CI/CD, shift?left testing, 12?factor / MACH principles). Drive reliability and operational readiness: capacity planning, runbooks, incident response, and on?call support. Deep expertise in Java/JEE and Spring Boot for microservices development. Strong experience in API design, Domain?Driven Design (DDD), and API gateway integration (Apigee); apply cloud?native patterns on Google Cloud Platform. Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (GKE); familiarity with serverless and containerized deployments. Messaging and event?driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Cloud Pub/Sub) and stream processing experience. Data systems and persistence: RDBMS and NoSQL (Postgres/DB2, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis), polyglot persistence, data modeling and replication. Concurrency, resiliency and performance: multi?threading, scalability patterns (retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads, idempotency), observability/tracing, and CI/CD/DevOps tooling. Travel As needed and flexible Other Preferred RESPONSIBILITIES Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing evolution of one or more microservice modules; produce technical designs and implementation plans. Assess the existing application footprint, identify gaps/risks, and recommend migration or modernization strategies for the target architecture. Drive platform modernization initiatives and deliver measurable improvements in scalability, performance, and capacity. Design and build reusable frameworks, libraries, and patterns that accelerate delivery and improve maintainability. Develop and validate proofs?of?concept for emerging technologies; guide selected POCs into production?grade solutions. Establish and enforce API, coding, and architecture standards; conduct code and architecture reviews. Ensure platform reliability and resiliency by designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, and automated recoverability. Own incident response and operational readiness activities, resolving production issues with minimal oversight and supporting on?call processes. Produce and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and developer guides to support operations and onboarding. Contribute to Ford?s Product Driven Organization (PDO) goals by identifying opportunities to reduce cross?team dependencies and increase team autonomy. Lead Engineer (9+ years) responsible for the architecture, technical design, and delivery of a microservices ecosystem and a greenfield open?stack platform for large?scale modernization. Accountable for the variable marketing incentive domain, driving modernization using MACH and 12?factor principles to improve scalability, modularity, and time?to?market. Owner for API design and the backend Spring Boot microservices suite on Google Cloud Platform, including integrations with Apigee and other cloud services. Serve as a cross?functional partner with Product Managers, Architects, DevOps, QA, and other stakeholders to define technical roadmaps and delivery plans. Technical leader and mentor: set engineering practices (TDD/BDD, CI/CD, shift?left testing), guide POCs, and ensure operational readiness and reliability. Qualifications EXPERIENCES / COMPETENCIES Education Qualification Bachelor?s or Equivalent Number of Years of Experience Minimum 9+ years Leadership Skills Excellent communication and interpersonal skills Ability to work effectively in a remote/virtual work setting with other global team members Proven facilitation skills - able to effectively drive discussion among diverse perspectives and reach a decision or recommendation Effectively work with cross-functional teams across the organization ? inside and outside of the technology and software organization