Director, Strategy & Operations

Ford Motor Company

Director, Strategy & Operations acting as a business strategist for the Software Factory that bridges engineering, product, and business stakeholders.

Posted 7/16/2026full-timeDearborn • Missouri • 🇺🇸 United StatesLeadWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in establishing and governing software release operations, focusing on automation, operational excellence, and cross-functional collaboration. Proficient in leveraging metrics and analytics to drive performance improvements and align engineering investments with business outcomes.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Release ManagementDevOps PracticesCI/CD TransformationOperational ExcellenceChange Management

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Software Delivery OperationsLean MethodologySix SigmaPerformance MetricsAutomationVendor ManagementBusiness Case DevelopmentCloud InfrastructureOperational StandardsProcess Improvement

Soft Skills

Analytical SkillsCross-Functional CollaborationLeadershipCommunicationChange Management

Tools & Technologies

Developer ToolingSaaSCloud ServicesOperational DashboardsRelease Calendars

Industry Keywords

Automotive IndustryOTATelematicsHardware/Software Integration

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Cloud

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Establish and govern a predictable software release operating model, including go/no-go processes, release calendars, and delivery rituals.
Lead release preparation, deployment readiness activities, and early warranty/hyper-care support while driving long-term automation of these workflows.
Define operational standards for reliability, security, scalability, and delivery consistency across engineering teams.
Partner with engineering leaders and product managers to align delivery capacity, roadmap timing, and market commitments.
Translate technical issues, delivery risks, and environment instability into clear business impacts for executive stakeholders.
Develop investment strategies for infrastructure, tooling, and vendor partnerships, including buy-versus-build decisions and ROI cases.
Monitor and improve software factory performance through metrics such as deployment health, uptime, cost efficiency, and DORA performance.
Identify bottlenecks and sources of manual toil across the delivery lifecycle, then drive process improvement and automation.
Lead operational reviews using data to assess system health, release performance, and budget adherence.
Build and scale a high-performing team to support release operations, operational governance, and analytics.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Experience leading operational excellence in a high-stakes delivery or production environment, ideally using Lean, Six Sigma, or similar frameworks.
Strong understanding of software delivery operations, release management, DevOps practices, and CI/CD transformation.
Demonstrated ability to build business cases and connect engineering investments to financial outcomes such as productivity, speed, and cost efficiency.
Experience managing vendor, SaaS, cloud, or managed service relationships, including performance accountability through SLAs.
Strong change management capability, with the ability to move organizations from manual, hero-based processes to standardized, automated operating models.
Ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, product, finance, procurement, and executive leadership.
Strong analytical skills with experience using operational metrics and dashboards to drive performance improvement.
Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and modern software delivery environments.
Automotive industry experience is helpful but not required; candidates can learn domain-specific complexities such as OTA, telematics, and hardware/software integration on the job.
Prior experience building or scaling teams in release operations, platform operations, or engineering business operations is preferred.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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.