Sr Director, Developer Experience and Platform Engineering

Ford Motor Company is seeking a Senior Director of Developer Experience and Platform Engineering who will leverage deep engineering expertise to shape platform strategy and architectural decisions. This role emphasizes technical leadership, hands-on engineering experience, and collaboration across the organization to ensure a top-tier Developer Experience embedded throughout the software lifecycle.

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

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
• 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