Senior Director, Developer Experience, Platform Engineering
Ford Motor Company
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Missouri • United States
Visit company websiteExplore more
Job Level
About the role
- 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
- 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
- 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.
Requirements
- 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
- Container-based platforms and orchestration technologies
- CI/CD systems, developer tooling, and code delivery pipelines
- Polyglot software architectures and modern application frameworks
- Observability, reliability, and SRE practices
- Strong working knowledge of:
- Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Multi-cloud and hybrid architecture trade-offs
- Solid understanding of:
- Secure software supply chains
- 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
- 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 Year’s Day
- Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
software engineeringsystem designproduction operationsplatform architecturecode deliveryGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)container-based platformsCI/CD systemspolyglot software architecturesobservability
Soft Skills
technical leadershiparchitectural judgmentdelivery experienceaccountabilitycommunicationstrategic thinkingproblem-solvingcollaborationinnovationadaptability