Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Ford Motor Company is seeking a Director of Strategy & Operations for their Software Factory. This role involves acting as a business strategist to define software operations, bridging engineering and business stakeholders to ensure technical operations create business value.
Responsibilities
- Establish and govern a predictable software release operating model, including go/no-go processes, release calendars, and delivery rituals
- Lead release preparation, deployment readiness activities, and early warranty/hyper-care support while driving long-term automation of these workflows
- Define operational standards for reliability, security, scalability, and delivery consistency across engineering teams
- Partner with engineering leaders and product managers to align delivery capacity, roadmap timing, and market commitments
- Translate technical issues, delivery risks, and environment instability into clear business impacts for executive stakeholders
- Develop investment strategies for infrastructure, tooling, and vendor partnerships, including buy-versus-build decisions and ROI cases
- Monitor and improve software factory performance through metrics such as deployment health, uptime, cost efficiency, and DORA performance
- Identify bottlenecks and sources of manual toil across the delivery lifecycle, then drive process improvement and automation
- Lead operational reviews using data to assess system health, release performance, and budget adherence
- Build and scale a high-performing team to support release operations, operational governance, and analytics
Skills
- Experience leading operational excellence in a high-stakes delivery or production environment, ideally using Lean, Six Sigma, or similar frameworks
- Strong understanding of software delivery operations, release management, DevOps practices, and CI/CD transformation
- Demonstrated ability to build business cases and connect engineering investments to financial outcomes such as productivity, speed, and cost efficiency
- Experience managing vendor, SaaS, cloud, or managed service relationships, including performance accountability through SLAs
- Strong change management capability, with the ability to move organizations from manual, hero-based processes to standardized, automated operating models
- Ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, product, finance, procurement, and executive leadership
- Strong analytical skills with experience using operational metrics and dashboards to drive performance improvement
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and modern software delivery environments
- Automotive industry experience is helpful but not required; candidates can learn domain-specific complexities such as OTA, telematics, and hardware/software integration on the job
- Prior experience building or scaling teams in release operations, platform operations, or engineering business operations
Benefits
- 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 Years Day
- Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.
- 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.
Company Overview