Platform Engineering Architect

Ford Platform Engineering Architect

At Ford, you’ll work on ideas that matter, alongside passionate people who want to make a global impact. Together, we’re shaping the next era of transportation—grounded in purpose, driven by progress. Make your move.

Job Type: Full time Work Type: Hybrid

At Ford, 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 part of something bigger than ourselves. Are you ready to help change the way the world moves?

Do you believe modern, secure, and scalable platforms can help teams build and deliver better software? Ford’s Marketing and Sales Technology organization depends on reliable cloud infrastructure, streamlined developer experiences, and strong platform engineering to support its eCommerce foundation. That’s where this role makes an impact.

We are seeking an experienced Platform Engineering Architect to shape the architecture and evolution of Ford’s next-generation platforms. In this individual-contributor role, you will help own and manage the architecture of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and Agentic Developer Platforms (ADPs), including self-service capabilities for CI/CD automation, infrastructure provisioning, and platform orchestration.

This role combines hands-on cloud and platform engineering with architecture leadership, DevSecOps, automation, and technical mentorship. You will partner with product teams, senior leaders, Enterprise Architecture, IT Operations, security, SRE, and other technical domains to translate business and developer needs into secure, scalable, and highly available platform capabilities.

Platform Engineering Strategy & Architecture

• Own and manage the architecture of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and Agentic Developer Platforms (ADPs), including self-service capabilities for CI/CD automation, infrastructure provisioning, and platform orchestration.
• Define and evolve the infrastructure architecture for next-generation platforms, researching current and emerging technologies and recommending solutions for future workload needs.
• Evaluate and select technologies and tools that support product development and deployment on the eCommerce foundation layer.
• Partner with product teams to understand developer pain points and improve the Developer Experience through platform engineering capabilities.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business needs and translate them into technical and non-functional specifications.
• Work with senior leaders across Ford’s Enterprise Architecture and IT Operations organizations to deliver measurable improvements to the eCommerce platform.
• Champion platform engineering and observability practices across the organization.

Cloud Infrastructure, Automation & DevSecOps

• Design, develop, and maintain secure, scalable cloud infrastructure platforms using modern DevSecOps and platform engineering practices.
• Provision and automate Google Cloud infrastructure, including VPCs, subnets, gateways, security groups, managed services, and Kubernetes clusters.
• Build and maintain infrastructure automation using tools such as Terraform, Packer, Ansible, shell scripting, NX Cloud, Helm, and Argo CD.
• Conduct Infrastructure as Code reviews and automate the deployment of cloud infrastructure.
• Build repeatable automation for DevSecOps tasks and improve software engineer productivity through integrated CI/CD and infrastructure provisioning services.
• Establish and apply best practices for code quality, security, performance, and scalability using tools such as SonarQube, Cycode, 42Crunch, Astra, build-time container vulnerability scanning, and FOSSA.
• Apply patch management, security controls, and operational practices that support platform reliability and maintainability.

Developer Platforms, Cloud-Native Systems & AI

• Develop and maintain self-service platform products for CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud services, and observability.
• Apply cloud-native architectures and technologies, including microservices, micro frontends, APIs, serverless, Kubernetes, and Docker.
• Support architectures and services using Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including Compute Engine, Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Operations suite, Anthos, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Cloud Scheduler, Bigtable, AlloyDB, and other managed services.
• Implement and monitor AI agents that automate platform engineering services, improve developer productivity, and support platform operations.
• Support Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agentic AI capabilities for platform engineering.
• Apply AI Operations (AIOps) practices to improve platform automation and Developer Experience.
• Advance Shift Left practices for quality, security, and open-source software use, alongside Shift Right platform engineering practices.

Reliability, Performance & Observability

• Design and apply auto-scaling, high availability, disaster recovery, and multi-region Active/Active and Active/Passive patterns.
• Create and maintain architecture diagrams, design documents, and operational procedures for high availability and disaster recovery.
• Use observability and application performance tools—including Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and Splunk—to monitor platform health and support incident diagnosis.
• Analyze kernel logs, network statistics, application logs, and APM metrics to troubleshoot CPU, memory, and resource hotspots, API latency, and platform-health issues.
• Identify root causes and resolve complex performance problems involving multiple teams, networks, and software across GCP, Azure, or AWS environments.
• Identify infrastructure-layer vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks and recommend solutions to improve subsystem quality and performance.
• Apply Cloud FinOps practices to understand and optimize cloud infrastructure consumption costs.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentor engineers, helping technical team members grow and succeed.
• Partner with cloud, security, SRE, release management, and other technical domain experts to deliver secure and reliable platform capabilities.
• Facilitate technical discussions among diverse stakeholders and help teams reach decisions or recommendations.
• Communicate architecture decisions, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical teams and executive leaders.
• Work effectively with global teams in remote and virtual environments and help lead teams through technical and organizational change.

We recognize that no one person will embody every quality or skill listed below. If you bring deep platform engineering expertise and are motivated to improve cloud platforms and developer experiences, we encourage you to apply.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline—or equivalent relevant experience.
• Preferred degree: Bachelor of Engineering.

Experience

• 15+ years of relevant professional experience.

• Experience designing, developing, and maintaining self-service platform products for CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud services, and observability.

• Experience with cloud-native systems, platform engineering, DevSecOps, and public cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform.

• Experience building scalable, reliable, and highly available solutions, including containerized and multi-tenant systems.

• Experience with performance testing, platform monitoring, and troubleshooting complex infrastructure and application issues.

• Experience deploying, evaluating, and monitoring AI agents for platform engineering automation.

• Experience collaborating with technical leaders and teams across cloud, security, SRE, release management, and software engineering.

• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to engage executive leaders and facilitate decisions across teams.

• Ability to work effectively with global teams, lead through change, and provide technical mentorship.

• Required Technical Experience

• Strong experience with platform engineering and self-service capabilities for CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud provisioning, and observability.

• Experience with GCP services such as Compute Engine, Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Operations suite, Anthos, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Cloud Scheduler, Bigtable, and AlloyDB.

• Experience provisioning Google Cloud infrastructure, including VPCs, subnets, gateways, security groups, managed services, and Kubernetes clusters.

• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code and automation tools such as Terraform, Packer, Ansible, shell scripting, NX Cloud, Helm, and Argo CD.

• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Tekton, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins.

• Experience with containers and orchestration technologies, including Docker, Kubernetes, GKE, and Red Hat OpenShift.

• Experience with application and infr