Director, Private Cloud Platform Engineering

Overview

We are the movers of the world and the makers of the future. We get up every day, roll up our sleeves and build a better world — together. At Ford, we’re all a part of something bigger than ourselves. Are you ready to change the way the world moves?

Enterprise Technology plays a critical part in shaping the future of mobility. If you’re looking for the chance to leverage advanced technology to redefine the transportation landscape, enhance customer experience and improve people’s lives, this is the opportunity for you. Join us and challenge your IT expertise and analytical skills to help create vehicles that are as smart as you are.

In this position …

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Private Cloud Platform Engineering Director to lead the modernization and evolution of our internal cloud infrastructure. In this role, you will drive the strategic direction, architecture, and delivery of our Private Cloud Orchestration Platform, enabling both containerised and VM workloads across hybrid environments. You will champion Developer Experience as a first‑class deliverable, ensuring our engineers can ship reliable software quickly through golden paths, service scaffolds, standardised CI/CD templates, preview environments, guardrails, and measurable time‑to‑first‑deploy targets.

This role requires a leader who blends deep technical expertise in private and hybrid cloud technologies with strong organisational leadership, fostering a culture of innovation, automation, and reliability.

This position is hybrid (onsite four days per week) for candidates who are in commuting distance to a Ford hub location or remote for non‑local candidates

• What you’ll do…

  • Strategic Leadership & Governance

    • 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‑organisational guardrail discussions to ensure cohesive governance.
    • Engage stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure and executive teams, communicating complex technical concepts in clear business terms.

  • Developer Experience & Enablement

    • Deliver Developer Experience (Dev Ex) 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.

  • Private Cloud & Hybrid Platform Engineering

    • Lead modernisation of our private cloud orchestration capabilities with a focus on scalability, security and interoperability.
    • Manage hybrid estates, bridging VM and containerised workloads across Open Stack (Nova, Neutron, Cinder) and Open Shift Virtualisation
      , ensuring compliance and SLA adherence.
    • Guide architectural decisions around Autopilot vs. Standard GKE
      , Workload Identity
      , Shielded Nodes
      , Binary Authorization
      , autoscaling strategies and release channels
      .

  • Git Ops, Policy‑as‑Code, and CI/CD Automation

    • Drive Git Ops 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 standardisation.
    • Standardise and scale CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Git Lab CI, Git Hub 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.

  • Service Mesh & Networking

    • 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,
      Network Policies (Calico/Cilium) and VPC configurations to meet performance and security objectives.

  • Observability & Reliability Engineering (SRE)

    • Strengthen observability practices, integrating Dynatrace with Open Telemetry, Prometheus and Grafana for metrics,…