Director, Strategy & Operations

Ford • Dearborn, MI

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Strategy & Operations will act as a business strategist for the Software Factory, defining how software is built, deployed, and maintained at scale. This leader bridges engineering, product, and business stakeholders to ensure technical operations translate into business value. The position combines strategic planning, operational governance, and analytics accountability—establishing release rhythms, guiding investment decisions, improving delivery health, and identifying bottlenecks across the software value stream. Over time, the role is expected to build and lead a small team spanning release management, operations, and analytics.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• 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 is preferred.

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.

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 Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed