Hybrid Director, Private Cloud Platform Engineering

at Ford Motor Company

• Job title: Director, Private Cloud Platform Engineering
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Ansible, Cloud, Consul, Flux, Grafana, Java, JavaScript, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Node.js, OpenShift, OpenStack, Prometheus, Python, Rust, Terraform, Vault, VMware, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Dearborn, United States

About the role

• Director of Private Cloud Platform Engineering at Ford overseeing private cloud modernization and development. Leading teams, driving strategic direction, and enhancing developer experience in a hybrid role.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Ansible, and proficiency in using Kubernetes-native tools like Helm.
• Programming languages like Go, Cue, Rust, Python, Java, Node.js etc. 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. This should include team management skills including experience in building and leading diverse engineering teams.
• 4+ years of strategic, communication and problem-solving experience to include:
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to develop and implement strategic plans that align with business objectives and drive technological innovation.
• Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical information to both technical, non-technical, and executive audiences. Ability to traverse multi-layer complex cross org structures, driving critical outcomes.
• Problem-solving Skills: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make data-driven decisions and manage risk effectively.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care, parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members, and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.