Remote Scientific Director Jobs in Michigan (NOW HIRING)

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...

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Private Cloud Platform Engineering Director to lead the modernization and evolution of our internal cloud infrastructure. In this role, you will drive the strategic direction, architecture, and delivery of our Private Cloud Orchestration Platform, enabling both containerized and VM workloads across hybrid environments. You will champion Developer Experience as a first-class deliverable, ensuring our engineers can ship reliable software quickly through golden paths, service scaffolds, standardized CI/CD templates, preview environments, guardrails, and measurable time-to-first-deploy targets.

This role requires a leader who blends deep technical expertise in private and hybrid cloud technologies with strong organizational leadership, fostering a culture of innovation, automation, and reliability.

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

You'll have...

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering,  or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience. 
• 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure and platform engineering, with a proven track record of leadership in managing private cloud infrastructure.
• 7+ years of technical experience including:
  • GKE, Anthos, OpenShift, OpenStack, and VMware. 
  • Experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Ansible, and proficiency in using Kubernetes-native tools like Helm. 
  • Programming languages like Go, Cue, Rust, Python, Java, Node.js etc. Hands-on experience with Terraform, Argo/Flux, OPA/Gatekeeper/Kyverno, and observability stacks (Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• 3+ years of experience leading large teams (~15-30+ engineers) platform or SRE organizations.   This should include team management skills including experience in building and leading diverse engineering teams.

• 4+ years of strategic, communication and problem-solving experience to include:

  • Strategic Thinking: Ability to develop and implement strategic plans that align with business objectives and drive technological innovation.
  • Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical information to both technical, non-technical, and executive audiences. Ability to traverse multi-layer complex cross org structures, driving critical outcomes.
  • Problem-solving Skills: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make data-driven decisions and manage risk effectively.

Even better, you may have...

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
• Relevant certifications such as Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Kubernetes Administrator, RedHat certification, network/security or similar.

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/LL5

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

#LI-remote

#LI-LA1

You'll have...

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

• 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure and platform engineering, with a proven track record of leadership in managing private cloud infrastructure.
• 7+ years of technical experience including:
  • GKE, Anthos, OpenShift, OpenStack, and VMware. 
  • Experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Ansible, and proficiency in using Kubernetes-native tools like Helm. 
  • Programming languages like Go, Cue, Rust, Python, Java, Node.js etc. Hands-on experience with Terraform, Argo/Flux, OPA/Gatekeeper/Kyverno, and observability stacks (Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• 3+ years of experience leading large teams (~15-30+ engineers) platform or SRE organizations.   This should include team management skills including experience in building and leading diverse engineering teams.

• 4+ years of strategic, communication and problem-solving experience to include:

  • Strategic Thinking: Ability to develop and implement strategic plans that align with business objectives and drive technological innovation.
  • Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical information to both technical, non-technical, and executive audiences. Ability to traverse multi-layer complex cross org structures, driving critical outcomes.
  • Problem-solving Skills: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make data-driven decisions and manage risk effectively.

Even better, you may have...

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
• Relevant certifications such as Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Kubernetes Administrator, RedHat certification, network/security or similar.

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.

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

#LI-remote

#LI-LA1

What you'll do...

Strategic Leadership & Governance

• Develop and execute the strategic roadmap for our private cloud and developer platform, aligning technology investments with business objectives.
• Lead architecture forums, platform RFC processes, and cross-organizational guardrail discussions to ensure cohesive governance.
• Engage stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure, and executive teams, communicating complex technical concepts in clear business terms.

Developer Experience & Enablement

• Deliver Developer Experience (DevEx) as a measurable platform outcome, building paved roads for teams to onboard quickly and safely.
• Provide golden paths for service creation, CI/CD, observability, and security through reusable templates and self-service tooling.
• Establish and track time-to-first-deploy and feedback-loop performance metrics to continuously improve developer productivity.

Private Cloud & Hybrid Platform Engineering

• Lead modernization of our private cloud orchestration capabilities with a focus on scalability, security, and interoperability.
• Manage hybrid estates, bridging VM and containerized workloads across OpenStack (Nova, Neutron, Cinder) and OpenShift Virtualization, ensuring compliance and SLA adherence.
• Guide architectural decisions around Autopilot vs. Standard GKE, Workload Identity, Shielded Nodes, Binary Authorization, autoscaling strategies, and release channels.

GitOps, Policy-as-Code, and CI/CD Automation

• Drive GitOps practices using Argo CD or Flux, and integrate Anthos Config Management/Fleet where applicable.
• Embed policy-as-code frameworks (e.g., OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno, CUE/Rego) into all deployment pipelines for compliance and standardization.
• Standardize and scale CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent), supporting progressive delivery via Argo Rollouts, Flagger, and canary/blue-green deployment strategies.
• Own IaC at scale using Terraform, Helm, and charts management, as well as Ansible to ensure consistency and reproducibility.

Service Mesh & Networking

• Champion service mesh adoption (Istio or equivalent: Linkerd/Consul etc) with a focus on mTLS by default, traffic splitting, Gateway API, and advanced traffic policies.
• Oversee network design, NetworkPolicies (Calico/Cilium), and VPC configurations to meet performance and security objectives.

Observability & Reliability Engineering (SRE)

• Strengthen observability practices, integrating Dynatrace with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana for metrics, logs, and traces correlation.
• Build SLO dashboards for both engineers and executives, enabling data-driven decision-making.
• Lead the SRE charter, defining and owning SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, chaos testing, and disaster recovery (RTO/RPO).
• Tie reliability goals directly to business KPIs and customer experience.

Security & Supply Chain Hardening

• Implement preventive security controls across the platform: IAM/RBAC strategies, Workload Identity Federation, and secret management (Vault/KMS).
• Integrate SBOM generation, SLSA provenance, image signing/verification (Binary Authorization), and policy enforcement at deploy time.
• Enforce compliance via NetworkPolicies, runtime security checks, and continuous vulnerability management.

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team (15-30+ engineers) focused on platform scalability, reliability, and innovation.
• Foster a collaborative, learning-oriented culture that values technical excellence, psychological safety, and outcome-driven engineering.
• Manage budgets, vendor relationships, and multi-year platform roadmaps across business units.