Sr Director, Developer Experience and Platform Engineering

Ford Global Career Site
Dearborn, MI

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. 

What you'll do...

 

Engineering, Platform & Code Ownership 

  1. 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: 

  1. Clear ownership and accountability 

  1. Roadmaps informed by real developer needs 

  1. 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 

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