Associate Software Engineer

About The Team

The Marketing Program System 2 (MPS2) team within Ford’s VMI (Vehicle Marketing & Incentives) domain builds high-scale, mission-critical systems for managing vehicle marketing programs and incentive calculations. This application is a data-intensive platform processing vast amounts of information across a multi-terabyte database and high-throughput event pipelines.

Role Overview

We are looking for a driven, detail-oriented Associate Software Engineer with a solid computer science foundation, hands-on programming experience in Java & Spring Boot, and a strong eagerness to learn how large-scale enterprise systems handle data, messaging, and distributed microservices.

Key Responsibilities

• Backend & Microservices Development
• Design, code, and test microservices and RESTful APIs using Core Java (11/17+) and the Spring Boot framework.
• Learn and adhere to clean code principles, SOLID design principles, and enterprise design patterns.
• Collaborate with frontend team members to integrate backend APIs with UI components (Angular).
• Working with Data & PostgreSQL
• Write clean, efficient SQL queries, joins, and database migrations for our PostgreSQL database.
• Learn and practice query optimization basics: understanding how indexes work, avoiding $N+1$ query issues in ORMs (Hibernate/Spring Data JPA), and writing batch-friendly operations.
• Gain exposure to handling high-volume datasets in an enterprise production environment.
• Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture
• Build basic producers and consumers using Apache Kafka (or similar messaging queues) for asynchronous event processing.
• Learn how distributed transactions, retries, and error handling are handled in event-driven systems.
• Code Quality, Testing & AI-Assisted Development
• Participate actively in the GitHub Pull Request (PR) review process.
• Leverage modern AI tools like GitHub Copilot to improve developer productivity while verifying generated code.
• Write comprehensive unit and integration tests using JUnit and Mockito to ensure high code quality and test coverage.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Core Java: Strong understanding of Core Java fundamentals (OOP concepts, Collections framework, Exception Handling, Concurrency/Multithreading, Java 8+ Streams and Lambdas).
• Spring Boot: Practical, hands-on experience building REST APIs using Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, and Dependency Injection.
• Database & SQL: Solid working knowledge of relational databases and SQL (preferably PostgreSQL or MySQL). Ability to write structured queries, joins, group-bys, and understand primary/foreign keys and basic indexing.
• Basic Messaging Knowledge: Conceptual understanding or foundational project experience with message queues like Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Version Control: Familiarity with Git & GitHub (cloning, branching, committing, creating Pull Requests).
• Testing Mindset: Familiarity with writing unit tests using JUnit and Mockito.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 0 to 2 years of professional software development experience or demonstrable project/internship experience in backend software engineering.