Director of Cloud SRE

Ford Motor Company; Augusta (ME); On-site; USD 142,000 - 268,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Parental leave and family care support

Tuition assistance

Vehicle discount program

Job summary

Ford Motor Company seeks a Director of Cloud SRE to lead a team of engineering leaders and engineers, federating core SRE principles across a hybrid, global organization. You will shape strategy, architecture, and roadmaps for internal observability tooling spanning cloud-native and on-premise environments.

You will partner with peers to extend reliability standards into data centers, manufacturing, and campus environments while maintaining vendor-agnostic tooling and hands-on technical

Qualifications

• 10+ years in Site Reliability Engineering or platform engineering.
• 4+ years in people leadership managing engineers.
• Hands-on experience building/operating observability platforms at scale.
• Experience with CI/CD integrations and developer tooling.
• Strong cloud architecture knowledge (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable).
• Ability to translate strategy into executable roadmaps.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year unified observability strategy across cloud-native and on-premise environments.
• Lead and grow a team of engineering managers and ICs in SRE and platform engineering.
• Drive roadmap for internally-built observability tooling with vendor-agnostic focus.
• Federate SRE principles across application and platform teams enterprise-wide.
• Embed observability in CI/CD pipelines and source repositories.
• Develop SRE maturity models and self-service tooling for teams.
• Build relations with manufacturing and OT leadership to extend reliability discipline.
• Represent platform direction to senior technology leadership and governance bodies.
• Balance build-vs-buy decisions for observability tooling.

Skills

SRE leadership

Cloud architecture

Observability

OpenTelemetry

Dynatrace

CI/CD integration

Vendor-agnostic tooling

Roadmapping

Executive communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Dynatrace

Datadog

New Relic

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.

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.

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.