Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Ford Motor Company is seeking a Senior Director of Developer Experience and Platform Engineering who will bring deep engineering experience to lead platform strategy and architectural decision-making at an enterprise scale. This role involves owning the technical vision for developer platforms, ensuring high-quality code delivery, and fostering collaboration across various engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for Developer Experience platforms, including:
- Developer portals and internal platform products
- CI/CD pipelines and code delivery systems
- Container-based developer and runtime environments, including orchestration and lifecycle management
- API platforms, service templates, and established “golden paths”
- Observability, reliability, and operational tooling
- Lead DevX platforms as products, with:
- Clear ownership and accountability
- Roadmaps informed by real developer needs
- Defined reliability, security, and service expectations
- Act as a hands-on technical leader:
- Review architecture, designs, and system patterns
- Apply practical engineering judgment to platform and tooling decisions
- Make informed trade-offs across scalability, security, reliability, and usability
- Provide deep technical leadership across polyglot engineering environments, spanning modern backend, frontend, mobile, data, and distributed systems technologies
- Apply strong understanding of multiple programming paradigms (object-oriented, functional, reactive, event-driven) to ensure DevX initiatives align with how engineers actually write and maintain code
- Be accountable for core repository strategy and health, including:
- Code organization and modularization
- Dependency, version, and release management
- Shared libraries, frameworks, and reuse patterns
- Secure, compliant contribution and governance models
- Influence and standardize code delivery practices across the organization, enabling:
- Consistent, automated, and high-quality build and release workflows
- Predictable delivery across both legacy and modern codebases
- Clear ownership and lifecycle management of shared repositories
- Define and own a multi-year Developer Experience strategy aligned with:
- Automotive and industrial software delivery constraints
- Safety, security, and regulatory requirements
- Operating at scale across global regions, time zones, and organizational boundaries
- A broad and evolving technology landscape, spanning legacy systems through modern and emerging (“bleeding-edge”) platforms
- Translate strategy into concrete engineering roadmaps and platform designs that can be executed incrementally and sustainably
- Ensure DevX initiatives reflect real developer workflows, operational constraints, and production realities
- Balance standardization and autonomy through well-designed paved paths that support consistency while enabling innovation
- Define, own, and continuously evolve Developer Experience KPIs that measure productivity, reliability, code quality, delivery performance, and developer sentiment
- Establish a DevX measurement framework that combines:
- Quantitative engineering metrics (e.g., lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, recovery time)
- Platform usage, adoption, and reliability signals
- Regular developer surveys and qualitative feedback mechanisms to identify friction and unmet needs
- Use DevX KPIs and survey insights to:
- Inform platform, tooling, and investment decisions
- Identify systemic bottlenecks across the software lifecycle
- Measure the effectiveness and impact of DevX initiatives over time
- Ensure metrics are used for continuous improvement, not individual performance management
- Provide clear executive-level visibility into Developer Experience health and trends
- Lead the responsible application of AI across the software development lifecycle, integrating AI-assisted capabilities such as:
- Code authoring, refactoring, and modernization assistance
- Automated code review and static analysis augmentation
- Test generation, defect detection, and coverage improvement
- Developer feedback and productivity tooling
- Ensure AI-enabled solutions:
- Improve code quality, maintainability, and developer experience
- Are integrated into existing developer workflows and CI/CD pipelines
- Meet enterprise standards for security, compliance, intellectual property protection, and ethical use
- Partner closely with:
- Product, Platform, and PDOs to align DevX platforms and tooling with delivery priorities, roadmaps, and outcomes
- Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Engineering
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Cybersecurity and Compliance teams
- Enterprise Architecture and Product Engineering
- Work with PDOs to ensure Developer Experience investments:
- Support predictable delivery and execution at scale
- Reduce friction across planning, build, test, and release phases
- Align technical capabilities with business and portfolio priorities
- Serve as a technical peer and trusted advisor to senior engineering, delivery, and infrastructure leaders
- Influence architecture, tooling, and delivery direction through technical credibility and delivery experience
- Embed Developer Experience into:
- Incident management and postmortems
- Reliability and SRE practices
- Secure software supply chain initiatives
- Change and release management
- Ensure DevX platforms and tooling are:
- Secure and resilient by default
- Observable and operated with production rigor
- Drive a culture of automation, self-service, and continuous engineering improvement
- Applying prior hands-on engineering experience to guide platform strategy and architectural decisions
- Maintaining strong technical fluency across languages, tooling, and system design
- Building developer platforms and workflows engineers trust and adopt
- Using data, KPIs, and developer feedback to guide continuous improvement
- Partnering effectively across engineering, PDOs, cloud, reliability, and security organizations
Skills
- Master's Degree or equivalent
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant hands-on development, system design, and production operations experience
- Direct involvement in building and operating complex, distributed systems
- Demonstrated ability to apply prior engineering experience to platform architecture, code delivery, and technical strategy
- Deep expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including production operations at scale
- Deep expertise in container-based platforms and orchestration technologies
- Deep expertise in CI/CD systems, developer tooling, and code delivery pipelines
- Deep expertise in polyglot software architectures and modern application frameworks
- Deep expertise in observability, reliability, and SRE practices
- Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Strong working knowledge of multi-cloud and hybrid architecture trade-offs
- Solid understanding of secure software supply chains
- Solid understanding of compliance and regulatory requirements common in automotive environments
- An engineering-first leader who has grown from hands-on engineer to senior technical leader
- Leads through technical depth, architectural judgment, and delivery experience
- Comfortable operating at executive-level strategy discussions
- Comfortable operating at deep technical and architectural detail
- Experienced in leading platform or infrastructure engineering organizations building real, production systems
Benefits
- Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
- Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare and more
- Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, 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 Year99s Day
- Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.
Company Overview
We don't just make history -- we make the future. It was founded in 1903, and is headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is https://www.ford.com.