Director of Private Cloud Platform Engineering

About

Join us in shaping the future of mobility at Ford Motor Company, where we strive to build a better world together. If you're eager to leverage cutting‑edge technology to transform transportation and enhance customer experiences, this opportunity is for you.

Position Overview

We are looking for a dynamic and visionary Director of Private Cloud Platform Engineering to lead the upgrade and development of our internal cloud infrastructure. In this role, you will set the strategic direction, architecture, and execution of our Private Cloud Orchestration Platform. This encompasses both containerized and VM workloads across hybrid environments. You will prioritize Developer Experience, providing our engineers with the tools they need to deploy reliable software efficiently.

We seek a leader with a blend of technical expertise in private and hybrid cloud technologies and strong organizational leadership skills, fostering a culture of innovation and reliability.

This position is hybrid (onsite four days per week) for candidates located within commuting distance to a Ford hub location or available remotely for non‑local candidates.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership & Governance: Develop and implement the strategic roadmap for our private cloud and developer platform in alignment with business goals. Facilitate discussions with stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure, and executive teams to ensure cohesive governance.
• Developer Experience & Enablement: Create a robust Developer Experience, enabling teams to onboard quickly and effectively through established golden paths for service creation, CI/CD, and security.
• Private Cloud & Hybrid Platform Engineering: Oversee the modernization of our private cloud orchestration capabilities, focusing on security, scalability, and interoperability while managing hybrid estates encompassing both VM and containerized workloads.
• GitOps, Policy‑as‑Code, and CI/CD Automation: Lead GitOps practices and the implementation of policy‑as‑code frameworks within deployment pipelines to ensure compliance and standardization across all systems.
• Service Mesh & Networking: Promote service mesh adoption and oversee network design and configurations to meet performance and security objectives.
• Observability & Reliability Engineering (SRE): Enhance observability practices and define SLIs/SLOs, integrating reporting and dashboards to support informed decision‑making.
• Security & Supply Chain Hardening: Implement preventive security controls, ensuring compliance through effective management of IAM, secret management, and continuous vulnerability assessment.
• Leadership & Team Development: Lead, mentor, and nurture a high‑performing engineering team focused on innovation within platform development while managing budgets and vendor relationships.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field with 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure and platform engineering.
• 7+ years of hands‑on technical experience with GKE, Anthos, OpenShift, and OpenStack.
• Proficiency in IaC tools such as Terraform or Ansible, along with strong programming skills in languages like Go, Python, or Java.
• Experience managing large teams (15‑30+ engineers) and fostering a diverse and inclusive team environment.
• Strategic thinking, problem‑solving skills, and exceptional communication abilities to convey complex technical concepts to various stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in relevant fields and relevant certifications, such as Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect or Kubernetes Administrator.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, and prescription coverage
• Flexible family care leave options
• Tuition assistance
• Discount program for employees and their families
• Generous paid time off
• Supportive work environment

Additional Information

• This role is considered leadership level 5.
• Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States.
• Ford Motor Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer and values diversity in the workplace.