We seek a highly motivated, technology-focused individual passionate about improving and simplifying Ford's highly complex global infrastructure environment across Cloud Platform, on-premises data centers, and distributed locations in all major regions. This role demands a proven people leader who will directly manage, mentor, and elevate a high-performing team of Domain and Solution Architects. You will be responsible for fostering a culture of engineering excellence, establishing architectural governance, and driving the strategic vision of your team. As a recognized thought leader, you will codify your team's innovations by publishing reusable architectural patterns and authoring authoritative white papers that influence both internal enterprise strategy and the broader technology community.
The ideal candidate is a rare hybrid: a strategic people leader capable of defining multi-year technology roadmaps, a thought leader who shapes enterprise standards, and an elite engineer who can still roll up their sleeves to write advanced Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and build robust CI/CD pipelines to automate infrastructure deployment. You possess a profound, expert-level understanding of traditional datacenter operations, heterogeneous OS management (Windows and Linux), and hypervisor ecosystems. You are also tasked with looking toward the future, guiding our cloud migration strategies and laying the infrastructural groundwork for Next-Generation AI and MLOps workloads. If you are a proactive problem-solver who requires minimal direction and is passionate about driving infrastructural convergence while leading top-tier talent, we want you on our team.
People Management, Thought Leadership & Executive Communication
Team Leadership & People Management: Directly manage, mentor, and inspire a specialized team of Infrastructure, Cloud, and Solution Architects. Handle talent acquisition, career development, performance management, and resource allocation to build a high-performing, autonomous architecture practice.
Pattern Publishing & Architectural Governance: Establish and lead an Architecture Center of Excellence (CoE). Codify complex solutions by designing, documenting, and publishing reusable architectural patterns, reference architectures, and deployment blueprints to accelerate enterprise-wide adoption and ensure consistency.
Thought Leadership & White Papers: Act as the vanguard of technological innovation by researching emerging tech and authoring comprehensive white papers, strategy documents, and internal engineering blogs. Document paradigm-shifting strategies (e.g., VMware-to-OpenShift Virtualization migrations, AI Infrastructure readiness) to guide the broader enterprise and establish industry presence.
Executive Storytelling & Autonomous Consulting: Translate highly technical engineering concepts into compelling business strategies. Consult proactively with application, database, and security teams on cloud-native best practices and workload placement without waiting for top-down direction. Deliver architectural decision records (ADRs) to C-suite executives and review boards.
Datacenter, Virtualization & Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Advanced Datacenter Engineering & Hardware Lifecycle: Lead holistic datacenter strategy, encompassing rack-and-stack operations, capacity planning, power/cooling considerations, high-performance storage arrays (SAN/NAS/NVMe), and complex compute topologies (Blade architectures, HCI).
Enterprise Virtualization Transformation: Manage massive-scale legacy hypervisor environments (VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter). Architect and lead the strategic migration pathway from traditional VMware infrastructures to modern, Kubernetes-native OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt), consolidating VM and container control planes.
Mainframe Modernization & Integration: Design low-latency, high-throughput integration patterns between modern microservices and legacy Mainframe systems (e.g., IBM z/OS, DB2, CICS). Architect secure API enablement layers and event-driven architectures to unlock Mainframe data.
Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure Strategy: Architect resilient, highly scalable hybrid cloud ecosystems bridging on-premises datacenters, GCP, and other public clouds, ensuring optimal workload placement based on cost, compliance, and performance.
Hands-on Engineering, OS Administration & Automation
Advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Scripting: Maintain a hands-on technical edge by building and testing sophisticated automation frameworks to provision infrastructure. Utilize expert-level Terraform, Ansible (Playbooks, Automation Controller), PowerShell (for Windows automation), Python, and advanced Bash.
CI/CD Pipelines for IaC: Architect, build, and maintain robust Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines specifically for infrastructure lifecycle management. Integrate automated testing, security scanning (e.g., tfsec, Checkov), and policy-as-code validations into infrastructure pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or Tekton to ensure safe, repeatable deployments.
Heterogeneous OS Administration (Windows & Linux): Act as the highest escalation point for both Windows and Linux ecosystems. Manage deep Windows Server administration, Active Directory (AD) topologies, Group Policy Objects (GPOs), and WSUS/SCCM frameworks alongside advanced Linux (RHEL/RHCOS) kernel tuning and troubleshooting.
GitOps & Application Delivery: Architect and implement declarative, GitOps-driven application and infrastructure deployment methodologies utilizing tools such as ArgoCD, Flux, Helm, and Kustomize. Establish immutable infrastructure paradigms to prevent configuration drift.
Future-State Enablement: Cloud Migrations & AI Infrastructure
Large-Scale Cloud Migration Execution: Architect and govern complex "lift-and-shift" and "refactor-to-cloud" migration programs from legacy datacenters to public cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure) utilizing enterprise migration frameworks and methodologies.
AI/MLOps Infrastructure Readiness: Design scalable infrastructure to support Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning workloads. Provision and manage GPU-accelerated node pools (NVIDIA vGPUs), high-throughput AI storage, and integrated MLOps platforms (e.g., OpenShift AI, Kubeflow) to support data science teams.
Mandatory Skillsets
Datacenter Operations & Architecture: Expert-level experience designing, building, and operating large-scale on-premises datacenters, including deep knowledge of server hardware lifecycle, complex storage fabrics, and bare-metal provisioning.
Enterprise Virtualization (VMware / OpenShift): Deep, hands-on expertise managing extensive hypervisor environments. Must have strong experience with either VMware (vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX) OR OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt), with the ability to lead transitions between the two.
IaC & CI/CD Pipeline Automation: Hands-on ability to write, review, and deploy infrastructure scripts using Terraform, Ansible, Python, PowerShell, or Bash, and proven experience building automated CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) to test, secure, and deploy that IaC code at scale.
Heterogeneous OS & Systems Management: Extensive administrative experience across both Windows ecosystems (Windows Server, Active Directory, PowerShell automation) and Linux environments (RHEL, systemd, kernel tuning).
Containerization & Kubernetes: Deep architectural understanding of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (4.x) and core Kubernetes primitives at an enterprise scale.
People Leadership & Mentorship: Proven track record of managing, leading, and mentoring teams of Architects or Senior Engineers in an enterprise setting.
**Mainfra
