IBM Sterling OMS Senior Engineer

Ford Motor Company is looking for a Senior Engineer with deep, hands-on, day-to-day technical expertise in IBM Sterling Order Management System (OMS) to join our Order Management engineering organization in Chennai. This is a strong hands-on engineering role—the candidate will be personally writing code, configuring the platform, building microservices, and debugging production issues. The role is suited for an experienced practitioner who thrives in configuring, customizing, and extending Sterling OMS, Order Hub, and Next Gen Call Center within complex enterprise ecosystems, while demonstrating strong engineering fundamentals, clean and maintainable code, disciplined unit testing, and a high bar for secure and compliant software delivery.

As a Senior IBM OMS Engineer, you will play a key hands-on role in designing, developing, and modernizing order management capabilities that support Ford's end-to-end commerce, order orchestration, and fulfillment journeys. You will work extensively and directly within the IBM Sterling OMS platform—including Order Hub and Next Gen Call Center modules—configuring business rules, writing custom APIs and services, extending workflows, and integrating Sterling with upstream and downstream enterprise systems. You will also build and deploy microservices using strong Java skills, packaged and run in containerized, cloud-native environments (GCP or equivalent). Your work will directly contribute to building reliable, scalable, and highly available order management capabilities that meet demanding performance and operational expectations.

This role requires a "product-mindset," technically hands-on engineer with strong command of Sterling OMS internals—order lifecycle, transaction management, agent/service framework, and integration patterns—as well as modern cloud and microservices engineering practices. You will partner with cross-functional teams (product, architecture, QA, and other engineering squads) to translate business requirements into well-structured, personally-built technical solutions within the Sterling platform. You must design and build software that aligns with enterprise standards for reliability, security, and cloud-native maintainability.

We are looking for someone who is proactive, outcome-driven, and able to navigate ambiguity—an engineer who codes and configures daily, digs deep into complex order management issues, proposes pragmatic solutions, and raises the overall quality bar through direct technical contributions, code reviews, and mentorship.

What You'll Do

• OMS Platform Engineering: Design, develop, configure, and maintain IBM Sterling OMS solutions, including distributed order management, reverse logistics, payments, inventory, order hub, call center etc.
• Customization & Extension: Build and extend Sterling OMS using Java-based customizations—user exits, agents, event handlers, custom APIs, and transaction extensions—to meet evolving business requirements.
• Order Orchestration: Configure and optimize order lifecycle flows, sourcing rules, release management, and fulfillment logic to ensure seamless end-to-end order processing.
• Integration: Design and build robust integrations between Sterling OMS and enterprise systems (ERP, POS, inventory, payment, and shipping platforms) using RESTful/SOAP APIs, JMS, and asynchronous messaging patterns.
• Database Management: Work with SQL databases to design efficient schemas, tune Sterling OMS data models, and optimize query and transaction performance.
• Troubleshooting: Perform deep troubleshooting and root cause analysis across Sterling OMS configurations, customizations, and integrations; drive fixes that address underlying architectural issues rather than symptoms.
• Engineering Best Practices: Uphold and advocate for:
  • Clean architecture, modular customizations, and readable code.
  • Comprehensive automated testing (unit, integration, and end-to-end).
  • Peer reviews and shared coding standards.
  • Secure coding practices and compliance with organizational security/dependency scanning.
• Mentorship: Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and guidance on Sterling OMS best practices and modern Java development.

Required Experience & Skills

• 8+ years of strong, hands-on experience with IBM Sterling Order Management System (OMS) in enterprise environments, including implementation, configuration, and customization.
• Hands-on experience with customizing Order Hub and/ or Next Gen Call Center modules within the Sterling OMS ecosystem.
• Strong, hands-on Java development skills, with proven experience customizing Sterling OMS using its extension framework (user exits, agents, event handlers, custom APIs).
• Practical experience designing, building, and deploying microservices.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (GCP or equivalent, e.g., Azure/AWS) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Deep understanding of Sterling OMS architecture: order lifecycle, transaction/agent framework, rule engine, sourcing, and inventory management.
• Strong experience with RESTful/SOAP APIs, XML/JSON, and asynchronous integration patterns (e.g., JMS, Kafka, or MQ) for connecting Sterling OMS to enterprise systems.
• Solid experience with SQL databases, including schema design and query/transaction performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of cloud native design patterns, and data structures.
• Demonstrated commitment to code quality with testing frameworks such as JUnit and Mockito.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with multiple stakeholders across global teams.
• Experience with e-commerce, retail, or automotive order fulfillment domains.
• Familiarity with modern engineering productivity tooling and/or AI-assisted development concepts.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Exposure to front-end technologies (React.js, JavaScript/TypeScript) for building supporting UI components or dashboards.
• Familiarity with modern engineering productivity tooling and/or AI-assisted development concepts.
• Experience working on OpenShift Container Platform
• Automation frameworks like selenium and playwright