Virtualization Platform Automation Engineer and Admin

Ford Motor Company • United States,

4d • $85,400 - $192,900 • Onsite

About The Position

Ford Motor Company is seeking a VMware and OpenShift Virtualization automation developer, engineer, and administrator to join its globally positioned, on-premises cloud platform team. The role designs, automates, implements, administers, and manages virtualization services, ensuring the stability, performance, and security of virtualized workloads through VMware and OpenShift technologies and operationally focused automation.

The position develops automation and GitOps workflows, improves platform reliability using Site Reliability Engineering practices, and builds observability and monitoring capabilities across the global compute environment. It provides technical consulting and custom cluster or VM solutions for application teams, plans and forecasts platform capacity, and creates internal and customer-facing documentation.

The role requires an associate degree or equivalent practical experience, extensive experience in automation development and virtualization infrastructure, and experience with Kubernetes and/or OpenShift Virtualization. Compensation is listed as $85,400–$192,900, with final salary grade and pay based on skills, experience, job scope, responsibility, and market value. Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance are not available. Ford offers medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, family-care and parental benefits, vehicle discounts, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, paid community-service time, paid holidays, and paid time off.

Requirements

• Associate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of experience as a developer (automation) and in IT infrastructure specializing in virtualization solutions such as VMware.
• At least 8 years of proficiency and programming experience in scripting languages such as Bash, PowerShell, or Python for automation.
• At least 2 years focused on Kubernetes and/or OpenShift Virtualization.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or GitOps.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps methodologies.
• Production experience engineering, administering, and automating VMware using IaC, with a strong understanding of VMware concepts.
• Understanding of OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt) and Kubernetes concepts.
• Experience with Linux administration and networking fundamentals.
• Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Dynatrace, and logging solutions.
• Solid understanding of virtualization concepts and technologies.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to troubleshoot complex issues across multiple layers of the stack.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts and work with cross-functional teams.
• Experience designing or consuming APIs.
• Familiarity with containers and deployment.
• Understanding of repeatable, reviewable infrastructure and configuration changes.
• Awareness of service health, incident response, and prevention of recurring operational issues.
• Experience securely handling authentication tokens and credentials.
• Experience writing and maintaining unit tests.
• Familiarity with GitOps principles and Git-based workflows.
• Experience using Git for version control and collaborative development.
• Demonstrated ownership, continuous improvement, security awareness, commitment to quality and discipline, adaptability, collaboration, and accountability for outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Jenkins and/or Tekton.
• Experience with Ansible or similar configuration-management tools.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Familiarity with software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS) solutions.

Responsibilities

• Develop automation scripts and playbooks for repetitive virtualization tasks, configuration changes, auditing, remediation, and ticketing-system integration.
• Use automation to deliver operator updates and changes efficiently at scale.
• Apply Site Reliability Engineering principles to improve platform stability, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Deploy and audit role-based access control; manage namespaces and resource quotas.
• Develop and maintain automation tools using PowerShell, Bash, Python, and C.
• Design, consume, and troubleshoot APIs to connect services and automate workflows.
• Handle authentication tokens and credentials securely according to established security practices.
• Write and maintain unit tests to verify behavior and prevent regressions.
• Build and support GitOps workflows for configuration, deployments, and infrastructure changes.
• Automate build, test, deployment, and operational processes; troubleshoot across scripts, applications, APIs, and automation pipelines.
• Collaborate with developers, operations teams, and stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver solutions.
• Document tools, integrations, tests, and procedures, following software development best practices including version control, code review, testing, and maintainable code.
• Use AI tools to support coding, troubleshooting, documentation, and workflow improvement while independently reviewing and testing outputs; protect confidential information, credentials, and proprietary code and apply human judgment and oversight.
• Implement and maintain end-to-end monitoring, logging, and tracing for the OSV environment, including integration with Dynatrace and Prometheus/Grafana.
• Explore and implement event-driven architecture for real-time monitoring and response.
• Develop capabilities to flag and report abnormalities and identify observability blind spots.
• Perform root cause analysis to identify and resolve issues across the global compute environment.
• Proactively monitor VM health, resource usage, and performance metrics, and monitor for unusual activity indicating possible compromise or misconfiguration.
• Provide technical consulting and virtualization expertise to application teams.
• Design, implement, and validate custom or dedicated clusters and VM solutions for critical applications with unique or complex requirements.
• Plan and forecast VMware and OpenShift Virtualization compute, memory, storage, and network capacity to ensure scalability and prevent resource exhaustion.
• Analyze resource-utilization trends and recommend infrastructure scaling, consolidation, or optimization.
• Work with application teams and stakeholders to understand future demand and project capacity needs.
• Develop and maintain capacity models and reports for strategic planning.
• Create, maintain, and update internal documentation and customer-facing content on the Ford docs site to support self-service and explain platform capabilities.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage.
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, and subsidized backup child care.
• Adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and other family-building benefits.
• 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
• Education Level: Associate degree