Director of Cloud SRE at Ford Motor Company

Job description

We are looking for a Director of Cloud SRE to lead a team of engineering leaders and engineers responsible for federating core SRE principles across a global, hybrid technology organization. This role drives the strategy, architecture, and roadmap for our internal observability and reliability tooling — spanning telemetry standards, developer pipeline integration, and application team SRE maturity — and works in close partnership with peer SRE leaders to extend that strategy consistently across cloud-native and on-premise environments alike. This is a builder's role as much as a leader's role. You will guide a team that develops internally-owned tooling built intentionally to remain vendor-agnostic so the organization is never architecturally locked to a single observability provider and drives Agentic AI deeper into our SRE ecosystem. While our primary application runtime is GCP, this leader must be equally comfortable partnering across the SRE organization to extend reliability and observability standards into data center, manufacturing, distribution, and global campus environments — meeting engineering and operations teams where they are, not just where the platform lives. The ideal candidate blends technical depth with organizational fluency: someone who can sit in an architecture review and a roadmap planning session with equal credibility, who has personally built and operated production systems, and who can partner effectively across a broader SRE leadership team to advance a long-term, unified observability strategy. • Partner with fellow SRE leaders to define and drive a multi-year, holistic strategy for unified observability and SRE platform offerings, spanning cloud-native (GCP) and on-premise (data center, manufacturing, distribution, campus) environments. • Lead, develop, and grow a team of engineering managers/leads and individual contributor engineers, building organizational depth in SRE practice and platform engineering. • Drive the roadmap for internally-built observability tooling, ensuring architecture remains vendor-agnostic and portable across telemetry backends (OpenTelemetry-first design, current integration with Dynatrace) with a focus on Agentic AI platforms to simplify correlation data. • Help federate core SRE principles — SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident management, toil reduction, capacity and reliability engineering — across application and platform teams enterprise-wide, working alongside peer SRE leaders rather than centralizing reliability as a bottleneck. • Partner with developer experience and platform engineering teams to embed observability and reliability tooling directly into CI/CD pipelines and source repositories, shifting reliability left in the development lifecycle. • Contribute to an SRE maturity model, providing application teams a clear, staged path to deepen their own reliability practice with SRE org support and self-service tooling. • Build cross-domain relationships with manufacturing, plant, and OT engineering leadership, in partnership with other SRE leaders, to extend reliability and observability discipline into environments with materially different constraints (legacy protocols, air-gapped or constrained networks, safety-critical operations). • Represent SRE platform direction to senior technology leadership, including architecture governance bodies, and act as an escalation point for major reliability and observability initiatives within your team's scope. • Contribute to vendor relationship and technology decisions related to observability tooling, balancing build-vs-buy tradeoffs against long-term platform and cost strategy. • Ensure the team maintains hands-on technical currency — reviewing designs, contributing to architecture decisions, and staying credible as a technical leader. • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience. • 10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering • 4+ years in a people leadership role managing engineering leaders and/or engineers. • Demonstrated experience building and operating observability platforms at scale, with hands-on depth in OpenTelemetry and at least one enterprise observability platform (Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, or similar). • Proven track record designing and delivering internally-built developer tooling, including integration with CI/CD pipelines, source control platforms, and developer workflows. • Strong working knowledge of public cloud architecture (GCP strongly preferred; AWS/Azure acceptable) and demonstrated ability to extend reliability practices into hybrid or on-premise environments. • Deep understanding of core SRE principles: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident management and postmortem practice, toil reduction, capacity planning, and reliability-by-design. • Experience operating in environments with heterogeneous infrastructure — cloud, data center, and OT/manufacturing or industrial environments a strong plus. • Demonstrated ability to build a long-term technical strategy and translate it into an executable roadmap, balancing tactical remediation against multi-year platform investment. • Strong executive communication skills — able to represent technical strategy to senior leadership and align cross-functional stakeholders around a unified direction. • Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) and modern software delivery practices (agile/PI planning experience a plus). Preferred: • Experience building or scaling an SRE function within a large, matrixed enterprise. • Familiarity with emerging AI/agentic observability standards (OTel GenAI semantic conventions) and their application to platform tooling. • Experience establishing SRE maturity models or capability frameworks used to guide staged team adoption. This role requires up to 10% travel. 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 child care 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 leadership level 5 and ranges from $141,700-$268,300. Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value. For more information on salary and benefits, click here: fordcareers.co 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. #LI-Remote #LI-DS2

Requirements

Must-haves

Lead, develop, and grow a team of engineering managers/leads and individual contributor engineers, building organizational depth in SRE practice and platform engineering.
Contribute to an SRE maturity model, providing application teams a clear, staged path to deepen their own reliability practice with SRE org support and self-service tooling.
Represent SRE platform direction to senior technology leadership, including architecture governance bodies, and act as an escalation point for major reliability and observability initiatives within your team's scope.
Contribute to vendor relationship and technology decisions related to observability tooling, balancing build-vs-buy tradeoffs against long-term platform and cost strategy.
Ensure the team maintains hands-on technical currency — reviewing designs, contributing to architecture decisions, and staying credible as a technical leader.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering
4+ years in a people leadership role managing engineering leaders and/or engineers.
Proven track record designing and delivering internally-built developer tooling, including integration with CI/CD pipelines, source control platforms, and developer workflows.
Deep understanding of core SRE principles: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident management and postmortem practice, toil reduction, capacity planning, and reliability-by-design.
Experience operating in environments with heterogeneous infrastructure — cloud, data center, and OT/manufacturing or industrial environments a strong plus.
Demonstrated ability to build a long-term technical strategy and translate it into an executable roadmap, balancing tactical remediation against multi-year platform investment.

Nice-to-haves

Strong working knowledge of public cloud architecture (GCP strongly preferred; AWS/Azure acceptable) and demonstrated ability to extend reliability practices into hybrid or on-premise environments.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) and modern software delivery practices (agile/PI planning experience a plus).
Experience building or scaling an SRE function within a large, matrixed enterprise.
Familiarity with emerging AI/agentic observability standards (OTel GenAI semantic conventions) and their application to platform tooling.
Experience establishing SRE maturity models or capability frameworks used to guide staged team adoption.
This role requires up to 10% travel.
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!
Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
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

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aigcpci/cdawsazureagile

Platform: eightfold
Effort: medium

Benefits

Benefits detected in the listing.

Dental

Vision

Paid Time Off

Parental Leave