Software Lead, Manufacturing Infrastructure

Ford Motor Company; Long Beach (CA); Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Paid time off

Tuition assistance

Vehicle discount program

Family building benefits

Paid holidays

Job summary

Ford Motor Company is seeking an engineering leader to own the software platforms, cloud services, and operational tools that support product manufacturing, deployment, diagnostics, and lifecycle management. The role drives the manufacturing software infrastructure and data-driven insights to improve quality, efficiency, and readiness.

The position focuses on ownership of the software platform and infrastructure ecosystem, with cross-functional collaboration across NPI, engineering,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/CE/EE or related field.
• 8+ years in software/infra/platform development.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams or major initiatives.
• Experience with cloud platforms and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Own Manufacturing Software Infrastructure.
• Define and execute long-term strategy for software infrastructure supporting manufacturing and operations.
• Build and maintain platforms for manufacturing execution, provisioning, diagnostics, validation, and release readiness.
• Establish end-to-end traceability across software, hardware, test results, and manufacturing outcomes.
• Develop scalable architectures that support current and future manufacturing needs.

Skills

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

Operational tooling

Automation

Monitoring

Data processing

CI/CD

DevOps

Release management

Software delivery pipelines

Engineering leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

Tools

GCP

Azure

Containers

Infrastructure automation

Job description

We are seeking an engineering leader to own the software platforms, cloud services, and operational tools that support product manufacturing, deployment, diagnostics, and lifecycle management.

This role will define and deliver the manufacturing software infrastructure needed for product bring-up, validation, provisioning, deployment, quality tracking, and production readiness. Working across New Product Introduction (NPI), engineering, manufacturing, cloud infrastructure, quality, and support teams, the leader will ensure these systems are scalable, reliable, secure, and ready for production.

Success in this role is measured by manufacturing readiness, data visibility, traceability, cloud platform reliability, diagnostic capability, and operational efficiency. The role focuses on ownership of the software platform and infrastructure ecosystem.

The ideal candidate brings experience in cloud platforms, software infrastructure, manufacturing systems, operational tooling, and data-driven engineering. They can lead complex initiatives across organizational boundaries and turn manufacturing data into insights that improve quality, efficiency, and product readiness.

What you'll do...

• Own Manufacturing Software Infrastructure
• Define and execute the long-term strategy for software infrastructure supporting manufacturing and operations.
• Build and maintain platforms for manufacturing execution, provisioning, diagnostics, validation, and release readiness.
• Establish end-to-end traceability across software, hardware, test results, and manufacturing outcomes.
• Develop scalable architectures that support current and future manufacturing needs.

Improve Manufacturing Data Visibility and Traceability

• Partner with NPI and manufacturing teams to standardize the collection, storage, processing, and presentation of manufacturing data.
• Build systems that bring together logs, test results, diagnostics, yield metrics, and quality data across manufacturing sites and suppliers.
• Deliver dashboards and reporting tools that provide actionable visibility into manufacturing health and product readiness.
• Ensure manufacturing data remains traceable throughout the product lifecycle.

Lead Cloud Solutions for Manufacturing Operations

• Partner with Ford cloud platform teams to deliver cloud-native solutions for manufacturing and operational workflows.
• Develop services for monitoring, diagnostics, provisioning, analytics, and software distribution.
• Promote cloud architectures that improve reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.
• Ensure solutions meet enterprise security, availability, and performance requirements.

Build Operational Support Platforms

• Lead development of cloud-based tools that help Ford support teams support products efficiently.
• Create diagnostic capabilities, monitoring solutions, workflows, and automation that reduce support effort and speed issue resolution.
• Improve visibility into manufacturing, deployment, and field issues through centralized operational tooling.

Enable Manufacturing Readiness

• Develop frameworks for manufacturing, deployment, and production-validation readiness.
• Automate product bring-up, qualification, factory acceptance, provisioning, and release validation.
• Establish operational health metrics, monitoring, and alerting across manufacturing systems.
• Drive continuous improvement in manufacturing efficiency, quality, and operational performance.

Provide Cross-Functional Technical Leadership

• Collaborate with NPI, engineering, manufacturing, quality, supplier, security, cloud, and operations teams.
• Define software contracts, workflows, and interfaces between manufacturing systems and engineering platforms.
• Lead technical decision-making across stakeholders and drive issue resolution across organizational and geographic boundaries.

You’ll have...

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or platform development.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams or significant technical initiatives.
• Experience developing cloud-based platforms and distributed systems.
• Experience building operational tooling, automation, monitoring, and data-processing systems.
• Experience with CI/CD, DevOps, release management, and software-delivery pipelines.

Even better, you may have...

• Experience with manufacturing software, factory operations, NPI processes, or production environments.
• Experience building data pipelines, telemetry platforms, or analytics solutions.
• Experience with GCP and Azure, cloud-native services, containers, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience supporting connected devices, embedded systems, automotive products, or hardware-integrated software.
• Experience collecting and analyzing manufacturing logs, diagnostics, validation data, and test-execution data.
• Familiarity with secure provisioning, certificate management, secure boot, and production security.
• Experience working directly with external suppliers and manufacturing partners.

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 a leadership level 5 and ranges from $167,200-$316,600.

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 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 with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week.