Director of Software Engineering

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...

Join our team in a Senior Engineering leadership role overseeing the delivery, architecture, and engineering for a complex micro services ecosystem for the Shop journey of the Global eCommerce platform.  You will build a modern, greenfield open stack platform based on MACH architecture principles for a large-scale ecommerce initiative with controlled data duplication and  provide technical leadership to multiple product lines across eCommerce platforms. This is a Delivery and technical leadership role with people management responsibilities.  

The Director of Software Engineering will have proficiency/exposure in Generative AI platforms, encompassing expertise in areas such as Multi-Modal RAG, Semantic Search, and Vector Databases. Proven capability to integrate and deploy LLM models for diverse business applications, taking ownership of all AI-related feature development for Ford.com

Although this is listed as a remote opportunity, there is a very strong preference for candidates living or willing to relocate to Dearborn, MI in a hybrid environment. Relocation assistance may be available for qualified candidates.

Onsite work of up to four days per week may be required for candidates within commuting distance of a Ford hub location 

What you'll do...

• Have a global leadership role. Team members will be in India, US and/or Europe
• Provide technical leadership to multiple product lines across eCommerce platforms
• Help business partners understand our iterative development approach and focus on delivering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and releases through careful and deliberate prioritization
• Initial team size will include around 50+ positions and ~ $8+ M of budget oversight.
• Responsible for the futuristic architecture landscape, evolution, and delivery of next gen platforms.
• Bring commerce platform engineering expertise and experience to significantly improve Ford’s current capabilities and ensure these platforms can grow to meet increasing demands
• Establish a platform improvement roadmap that describes key areas of priority based on assessment of current capabilities and identifies key dependencies
• Identify and recommend related enterprise foundational technology capabilities and improvements or business model changes that should be pursued to improve our customer platform capability
• Contribute to Ford’s Product Driven Organization (PDO) model by identifying improvements and areas that help to reduce dependencies and increase autonomy for teams to delivery.

Leadership Skills:

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to work effectively in a remote/virtual work setting with other global team members
• Proven facilitation skills - able to effectively drive discussion among diverse perspectives and reach a decision or recommendation
• Proven ability to work closely with executive leadership teams
• Effectively work with cross-functional teams across the organization – inside and outside of the technology and software organization
• Ability to lead through change

You'll have...

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience. 

• 10+ years of strong hands-on Software engineering/ programming/ solution design experience to include:

  • Experience/Awareness of Microservices architecture, Cloud-Native architectures, Event-driven architectures, APIs, Domain-Driven Design, Public Cloud (Google Cloud), Serverless, Kubernetes, Docker, DevOps, building scalable, reliable, available solutions, and/or performance testing.
  • Strong technical background with the capability of being hands-on and earn the respect and ability to mentor top individual technical talent.
  • Conversant in multiple programming languages. Thorough knowledge of multi-threading, concurrency, and parallel processing concepts including scalability, performance, and consistency characteristics of a microservices driven eCommerce architecture
  • Experience in Cloud Native systems, Transactional Systems, Multi-Tenancy, five-nines availability, and Containerization technologies
  • Experience in collaborating and partnering with other technical domain experts such as cloud, security, SRE, and DevOps.
  • Experience/awareness in building structured, semi-Structured and unstructured data stores with a good understanding of RDBMS, No-SQL databases and strong exposure to data modelling, data access patterns, data replication, active-active, polyglot persistence setup.
• 2 + years of experience or at least exposure in GenAI platforms – Multi Modal RAG, Semantic search, Vector DBs, Integrate LLM models to power business use cases and lead all AI related features on ford.com.      This will include experience/exposure with Generative AI platforms, including Multi-Modal RAG, Semantic Search, and Vector Databases

Even better, you may have...

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering or related field
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Proven facilitation skills - able to effectively drive discussion among diverse perspectives and reach a decision or recommendation.

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 the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• Immediate medical, dental, and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care, parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare 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.

For more information on salary and benefits, click here:

https://fordcareers.co/LL5SP1

This position is leadership level 5.

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.

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

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