Ford Motor Company

Director, IVI Systems – Software Product Engineering

Ford Motor Company

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Dearborn • Missouri • United States

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Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

Cloud

About the role

  • Strategic Feature Lifecycle Management: Own and drive the end-to-end technical execution of the IVI portfolio. Ensure technical feasibility, integration, and quality across all vehicle milestones, maintaining a deep architectural understanding of system behaviors (SOA, CAN, and cloud extensions).
  • High-Level Design & Traceability: Lead the translation and traceability between Product, Systems, and UX. Oversee the creation of Feature HLDs and system APIs, ensuring they align with platform constraints and vehicle configurations.
  • Technical Collaboration & "Product Truth": Act as the engineering lead within the Triad partnership (Product, Design, Technical Strategy). Institutionalize architecture and design reviews to confirm specification completeness and technical alignment before implementation begins.
  • Partner & Ecosystem Engineering: Serve as the executive technical liaison to external technology partners. Oversee API integration, feature contract negotiations, and compliance with internal architectural standards.
  • Agile Governance & PI Planning: Lead the technical input for Program Increment (PI) Planning. Coordinate development OKRs, document engineering commitments, and ensure that technical gaps or open architecture issues are visible and tracked at the leadership level.
  • Risk Engineering & Mitigation: Proactively identify and mitigate architecture-level and integration risks. Lead Change Request (CR) impact assessments, providing technical cost/timing estimates and risk analysis across affected ECUs and software layers.
  • Defect Triage & Quality Strategy: Establish the strategy for defect root cause isolation. Prioritize and assign complex defects based on platform impact and customer experience, ensuring the backlog is technically scoped and prioritized for the engineering teams.
  • Full-Stack Validation & Sign-Off: Accountable for the technical sign-off of feature releases. Ensure robust validation across simulated environments (HIL/SIL) and in-vehicle testing, covering everything from UI responsiveness to middleware and actuator-level outputs.
  • Continuous Improvement & OTA Strategy: Lead the delivery of over-the-air (OTA) enhancements and performance improvements, utilizing platform diagnostics and customer data to drive post-launch excellence.
  • Executive Visibility & Metrics: Maintain technical dashboards that track feature coverage, architecture readiness, and open risks. Report to senior leadership with a focus on engineering-level gaps and proposed technical mitigations (Sagas/Epics/Stories).

Requirements

  • Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
  • Experience: 10+ years in automotive software or consumer electronics, with a focus on vehicle embedded development, HMI and Infotainment systems.
  • Leadership: Proven success as a "Leader of Leaders," managing large engineering organizations through high-stakes vehicle program deliveries.
  • Technical Breadth: Deep expertise in embedded systems architecture, cloud interactions, and the translation of UX intent into implementation tasks.
  • Systems Engineering: Mastery of requirement decomposition, API contract negotiation, and cross-stack integration.
  • Communication: Exceptional ability to align senior stakeholders across Design, Product, and Safety (ASO) on technical execution paths.
  • You may also have:
  • Data-Driven Prioritization: Experience using DTUX or similar analytics to drive engineering prioritization and feature enhancements.
  • Safety Expertise: Advanced knowledge of Functional Safety (FuSa) and ISO 26262 standards.
  • Advanced Degree: Master’s degree in Engineering or an MBA.
  • Ecosystem Experience: Direct experience managing technical relationships with major silicon or software ecosystem partners.
Benefits
  • Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
  • Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care 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
embedded systems architectureAPI contract negotiationHMI systemsInfotainment systemscloud interactionsrequirement decompositiondefect root cause isolationover-the-air (OTA) enhancementsfull-stack validationtechnical sign-off
Soft Skills
leadershipcommunicationtechnical collaborationrisk engineeringcontinuous improvementstrategic thinkingstakeholder alignmentproblem-solvingproject managementcross-functional leadership
Certifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer ScienceBachelor’s degree in Electrical EngineeringMaster’s degree in EngineeringMBAISO 26262 certificationFunctional Safety (FuSa) certification