Sr Director, Developer Experience and Platform Engineering Full Time

In this position…

This role requires a leader who brings deep hands-on engineering experience, having personally designed, built, and operated complex systems earlier in their career, and who now applies that experience to platform strategy, architectural decision-making, and technical leadership at enterprise scale.

The Senior Director, Developer Experience and Platform Engineering brings technical credibility, architectural judgment, and engineering leadership to ensure Developer Experience is a first-class engineering discipline embedded across the software lifecycle. The role emphasizes hands-on engineering experience, platform ownership, and technical decision-making, while also requiring strong leadership, collaboration, and strategic alignment across the organization.

Responsibilities

What you’ll do…

Engineering, Platform & Code Ownership

• 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

Programming Languages, Core Repositories & Code Delivery:

• 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

Strategy Grounded in Engineering Reality

• 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

Metrics, Measurement & Continuous Improvement

• 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

AI-Enabled Engineering & Code Quality

• 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

Cross-Functional Technical & Delivery Leadership

• 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

Operational Excellence & Reliability Integration

• 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
• How success is achieved…
• 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

Qualifications

You’ll have…

Engineering & Technical Expertise

• 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
• Container-based platforms and orchestration technologies
• CI/CD systems, developer tooling, and code delivery pipelines
• Polyglot software architectures and modern application frameworks
• Observability, reliability, and SRE practices
• Strong working knowledge of:
• Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Multi-cloud and hybrid architecture trade-offs
• Solid understanding of:
• Secure software supply chains
• Compliance and regulatory requirements common in automotive environments

Leadership Profile

• 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
• Deep technical and architectural detail
• Experienced in leading platform or infrastructure engineering organizations building real, production systems

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we’ve outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply!

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• 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.

This position is a leadership level 4.

For more information on salary and benefits, click here: https://fordcareers.co/LL4Benefits

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.