Software Engineering Manager

Ford Motor Company’s Vehicle Care engineering team builds platforms and experiences that help customers understand, maintain, service, and get more value from their vehicles. The Software Engineering Manager will lead and grow a multidisciplinary engineering team, shape technical strategy, partner with product and design, and own architecture, delivery, operational health, and engineer development.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and develop engineers across experience levels, providing clear expectations, actionable feedback, autonomy, and meaningful growth opportunities
• Build an inclusive, collaborative, and psychologically safe culture where diverse perspectives are valued
• Hire and develop talent as the team and organization continue to grow
• Partner with product managers, designers, and business stakeholders to translate customer needs into clear technical plans
• Bring engineering into product discovery early, helping partners evaluate opportunities, assumptions, risks, and potential solutions
• Shape the roadmap by balancing customer value with reliability, security, technical debt, and architectural investment
• Navigate cross-team dependencies and communicate decisions and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical partners
• Maintain a strong technical pulse while empowering engineers to own implementation and design decisions
• Guide architecture, system and API design, and technical tradeoffs for scalable, secure, and maintainable systems
• Foster end-to-end ownership, including observability, incident response, performance, reliability, and a sustainable support model
• Improve how the team builds and delivers software through automation, testing, continuous delivery, and fast feedback
• Lead calmly through ambiguity and production challenges, using operational and delivery signals to help the team learn and improve

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related OR a combination of education and experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years directly managing software engineers, or equivalent experience
• A consistent track record of hiring, developing, and leading effective engineering teams
• Experience creating a healthy team environment that is supportive, challenging, inclusive, and accountable
• Strong technical judgment grounded in experience building and operating complex software systems at scale
• Experience leading significant technical initiatives with dependencies and impact across multiple teams
• The ability to partner closely with product, design, data science, and business stakeholders to define, deliver, and measure product outcomes
• A pragmatic approach to architecture and design, with a preference for simple, extensible solutions that can evolve across customers and use cases
• A high bar for product quality and operational rigor, including reliability, observability, and sustainable production support
• The ability to lead with autonomy, sound judgment, and calm in fast-moving and ambiguous environments
• Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States
• Strong product and design instincts, with an ability to find elegant solutions to complex customer problems
• Experience building platforms or shared capabilities used by multiple product teams
• Experience building relationships and influencing technical direction across organizational boundaries
• Experience leading a distributed team across locations or time zones