Director, Private Cloud Platform Engineering · Ford Motor Company

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:23:21 GMT
Engineering

Ford Motor Company · United States · Competitive salary and benefits package · hybrid

We are the movers of the world and the makers of the future. At Ford, we're all a part of something bigger than ourselves. Are you ready to change the way the world moves? Enterprise Technology plays a critical part in shaping the future of mobility. If you're looking for the chance to leverage advanced technology to redefine the transportation landscape, enhance customer experience and improve people's lives, this is the opportunity for you. Join us and challenge your IT expertise and analytical skills to help create vehicles that are as smart as you are.

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Private Cloud Platform Engineering Director to lead the modernization and evolution of our internal cloud infrastructure. In this role, you will drive the strategic direction, architecture, and delivery of our Private Cloud Orchestration Platform, enabling both containerized and VM workloads across hybrid environments. You will champion Developer Experience as a first-class deliverable, ensuring our engineers can ship reliable software quickly through golden paths, service scaffolds, standardized CI/CD templates, preview environments, guardrails, and measurable time-to-first-deploy targets.

This role requires a leader who blends deep technical expertise in private and hybrid cloud technologies with strong organizational leadership, fostering a culture of innovation, automation, and reliability.

Responsibilities

Develop and execute the strategic roadmap for our private cloud and developer platform, aligning technology investments with business objectives.

Lead architecture forums, platform RFC processes, and cross-organizational guardrail discussions to ensure cohesive governance.

Engage stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure, and executive teams, communicating complex technical concepts in clear business terms.

Developer Experience & Enablement

Deliver Developer Experience (DevEx) as a measurable platform outcome, building paved roads for teams to onboard quickly and safely.

Provide golden paths for service creation, CI/CD, observability, and security through reusable templates and self-service tooling.

Establish and track time-to-first-deploy and feedback-loop performance metrics to continuously improve developer productivity.

Private Cloud & Hybrid Platform Engineering

Lead modernization of our private cloud orchestration capabilities with a focus on scalability, security, and interoperability.

Manage hybrid estates, bridging VM and containerized workloads across OpenStack (Nova, Neutron, Cinder) and OpenShift Virtualization, ensuring compliance and SLA adherence.

Guide architectural decisions around Autopilot vs. Standard GKE, Workload Identity, Shielded Nodes, Binary Authorization, autoscaling strategies, and release channels.

GitOps, Policy-as-Code, and CI/CD Automation

Drive GitOps practices using Argo CD or Flux, and integrate Anthos Config Management/Fleet where applicable.

Embed policy-as-code frameworks (e.g., OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno, CUE/Rego) into all deployment pipelines for compliance and standardization.

Standardize and scale CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent), supporting progressive delivery via Argo Rollouts, Flagger, and canary/blue-green deployment strategies.

Own IaC at scale using Terraform, Helm, and charts management, as well as Ansible to ensure consistency and reproducibility.

Service Mesh & Networking

Champion service mesh adoption (Istio or equivalent: Linkerd/Consul etc) with a focus on mTLS by default, traffic splitting, Gateway API, and advanced traffic policies.

Oversee network design, NetworkPolicies (Calico/Cilium), and VPC configurations to meet performance and security objectives.

Observability & Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Strengthen observability practices, integrating Dynatrace with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana for metrics, logs, and traces correlation.

Build SLO dashboards for both engineers and executives, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Lead the SRE charter, defining and owning SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, chaos testing, and disaster recovery (RTO/RPO).

Tie reliability goals directly to business KPIs and customer experience.

Security & Supply Chain Hardening

Implement preventive security controls across the platform: IAM/RBAC strategies, Workload Identity Federation, and secret management (Vault/KMS).

Integrate SBOM generation, SLSA provenance, image signing/verification (Binary Authorization), and policy enforcement at deploy time.

Enforce compliance via NetworkPolicies, runtime security checks, and continuous vulnerability management.

Leadership & Team Development

Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team (15–30+ engineers) focused on platform scalability, reliability, and innovation.

Foster a collaborative, learning-oriented culture that values technical excellence, psychological safety, and outcome-driven engineering.

Manage budgets, vendor relationships, and multi-year platform roadmaps across business units.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.

10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure and platform engineering, with a proven track record of leadership in managing private cloud infrastructure.

7+ years of technical experience including GKE, Anthos, OpenShift, OpenStack, and VMware, as well as programming languages like Go, Cue, Rust, Python, Java, Node.js, and hands-on experience with Terraform, Argo/Flux, OPA/Gatekeeper/Kyverno, and observability stacks (Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).

3+ years of experience leading large teams (~15–30+ engineers) platform or SRE organizations, with team management skills including experience in building and leading diverse engineering teams.

4+ years of strategic, communication, and problem-solving experience, including strategic thinking, communication skills, and problem-solving skills.

Even better, you may have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or relevant certifications such as Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Kubernetes Administrator, RedHat certification, network/security or similar.