Software Lead, Manufacturing Infrastructure

Ford • Long Beach, CA

9d • $167,200 - $316,600 • Hybrid

About The Position

Ford Motor Company is seeking an engineering leader to own the software platforms, cloud services, and operational tools supporting product manufacturing, deployment, diagnostics, and lifecycle management. The role defines and delivers manufacturing software infrastructure for product bring-up, validation, provisioning, deployment, quality tracking, and production readiness. Working across New Product Introduction (NPI), engineering, manufacturing, cloud infrastructure, quality, suppliers, and support teams, the leader ensures these systems are scalable, reliable, secure, and production-ready.

The role owns the manufacturing software platform and infrastructure ecosystem. Success is measured by manufacturing readiness, data visibility and traceability, cloud platform reliability, diagnostic capability, and operational efficiency. The ideal candidate brings experience in cloud platforms, software infrastructure, manufacturing systems, operational tooling, and data-driven engineering, and can lead complex cross-organizational initiatives that turn manufacturing data into insights to improve quality, efficiency, and product readiness.

The position is hybrid, with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week. It is leadership level 5, with a salary range of $167,200–$316,600. Visa sponsorship is available. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States; employment eligibility will be verified at hire.

Ford offers medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage; family-care and parental benefits; family-building benefits; employee and family vehicle discounts and management leases; tuition assistance; employee resource groups; paid community-service time; paid holidays; and paid time off with the option to purchase additional vacation time.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Partner with NPI and manufacturing teams to standardize the collection, storage, processing, and presentation of manufacturing data.
• Build systems that combine 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage.
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, and subsidized back-up child care.
• Family-building benefits, including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement and fertility treatments.
• 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.
• 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: Senior