Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Ford
Palo Alto, CA
$150,200–$283,500from the description
Aug 10, 2026
Palo Alto, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Senior Software Engineer role on Ford's internal Messaging & Observability platform team, responsible for designing and operating the messaging middleware (Kafka-based), data replication tooling, and observability pipelines (metrics, logs, traces) that all engineering teams at Ford depend on. The role involves building backend services in Java/Spring Boot on AWS and GCP, maintaining CI/CD pipelines, and occasionally contributing to broader application development efforts. It suits an experienced cloud-native engineer comfortable owning shared, mission-critical infrastructure at scale.
Senior level · 5+ years · Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 120 people in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 90–160
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $133,635 (middle half $104,090–$156,640). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 12, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The role is classified as Software Developers (15-1252) rather than Systems Administrators (15-1244) because the primary day-to-day work is building and shipping middleware services, observability pipelines, and backend tooling — not merely operating infrastructure someone else built. The alt code reflects the meaningful operational/platform-ops component.
The required skills (Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, gRPC, REST, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, CI/CD, Jenkins, ArgoCD, SonarQube, GitHub) are drawn from the 'What you'll do' section, which uses firm language ('build', 'implement', 'apply … using tools such as'). The 'Even better, you will have' section is treated as preferred throughout.
AWS and GCP appear together in the required section as interchangeable ('AWS and/or GCP'), so each is listed with the other as an alternative. The 5-year figure for cloud experience is stated at the role level in 'You'll have' and also echoed in 'Even better' for GCP/AWS specifically.
The posting states '#LI-Hybrid', indicating a hybrid work arrangement — not fully remote.
Visa sponsorship is explicitly not available; candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States.
The salary range ($150,200–$283,500/year) is quoted for 'leadership level 6'; the wide band reflects Ford's internal leveling structure.
Read the full posting
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