Software Engineer, Design Technology

Tesla

Palo Alto, California Posted October 26, 2026

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On-site Full-time Mid level
Job Description

Description:
Tesla's Vehicle Engineering department is made up of thousands of vehicle, battery, and manufacturing engineers. They handle the mechanical and industrial design of every major program, including batteries, Optimus, Robotaxi, and all new factories. Engineering Automation Software, part of Vehicle Engineering, builds the tools these engineers use.
As a Software Engineer on the Design Exchange team, you will build the backend services that deliver Tesla's engineering design data (parts, change actions, CAD files, and access decisions) to the internal applications that depend on it. Our APIs sit between Tesla's hardware design platforms and the long list of consumers across the design and manufacturing process. Optimus, Megapack, and every vehicle program rely on this data flowing reliably.
Joining our team means directly impacting Tesla's ability to communicate critical design data as the company scales to ship millions of products a year from factories around the world.

Responsibilities:
Build gRPC and REST endpoints in Go that securely serve data to engineering and manufacturing applications across the company

Integrate with Tesla's centralized authorization platform to evaluate attribute-based access policies for access control

Extend our persistence layer (MySQL,Neo4j) so access and data lookups stay inside a low latency budget

Migrate existing consumers off the legacy services onto the new platforms, without breaking them

Own deployment, alerting, and runbooks for the services you build (Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Helm), take on-call rotations, run incidents as Incident Commander, and write actionable incident reports

Write and review design docs for new services, refactors, and technology choices

Review code from teammates and give useful feedback

Maintain accurate Jira tickets so the team can plan capacity, and collaborate with other teams to understand their needs and deliver solutions

Help with hiring by running technical screens and giving the hiring manager real feedback in panels

Requirements:
Excellent knowledge of at least one statically typed backend language (Go preferred; Java, Kotlin, C++, Rust , etc. experience transferable)

Experience shipping backend services in production

Strong understanding of REST and gRPC APIs and microservice architecture

Comfortable with relational and graph databases, including schema design and efficient querying

Proficient with Git and Docker, and with observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana

Excellent written communication skills, including design docs and PR descriptions for async collaboration across time zones

Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, or ArgoCD is a plus

Experience with identity and access systems (OAuth, OBO, RBAC, ABAC, OPA) is a plus

Experience with event streaming or workflow orchestration platforms (Kafka, Temporal) is a plus

Exposure to PLM or CAD systems (CATIA, 3DX) is a plus. We will teach the domain regardless, but it cuts ramp time

Compensation & Benefits:
Benefits

Along with competitive pay, as a full-time Tesla employee, you are eligible for the following benefits at day 1 of hire:
Medical plans > plan options with $0 payroll deduction
Family-building, fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits
Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both have options with a $0 paycheck contribution
Company Paid (Health Savings Accounts) HSA Contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA
Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits
Company paid Basic Life, AD&D
Short-term and long-term disability insurance (90 day waiting period)
Employee Assistance Program
Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions), and Paid Holidays
Back-up childcare and parenting support resources
Voluntary benefits to include: critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance
Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs
Tesla Babies program
Commuter benefits
Employee discounts and perks program

Expected Compensation
$140,000 - $258,000/annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefitsPay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements dependent on the position offered. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

Required Skills
software development manufacturing gRPC MySQL Kubernetes Argo CD Helm Jira collaboration Java Kotlin C++ Rust microservices Git Docker
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