[Hiring] Azure and Dynamics Cloud Platform Engineering and Operations Manager @Ford

Role Description

The Enterprise Platform Engineering and Operations (EPEO) Cloud Platform team at Ford offers one of the premier environments to learn and drive the inner workings of cloud solutions, automation, AI and enterprise capabilities. As a leader within this team, you will touch, use, and directly influence the technologies and tools that power Ford’s global cloud offerings and software development space. We are committed to transforming Ford’s cloud infrastructure into a modern, near-instant provisioning engine for compute, network, storage, and database services.

• Lead and provide technical guidance to a global team of 6 cloud engineers.
• Cultivate a culture of proactive continuous improvement leveraging automation and AI.

Automation Engineering & DevX:

• Drive Developer Experience by achieving feature parity with GCP.
• Transition manual Azure processes to automated workflows leveraging project Chassis framework and AI.
• Reduce manual toil and ticketing.

Operations Management:

• Lead day-to-day operations for a global platform team.
• Manage a "follow-the-sun" support model across North America (NA) and Asia-Pacific (AP) regions.

Incident Response:

• Oversee incident response and escalation workflows.
• Ensure the team meets or exceeds MTT(x) goals.

Strategy & Roadmap:

• Define and maintain the Azure/Dynamics platform strategy and roadmap within Jira.
• Ensure strict adherence to Jira practices and PI planning.

Financial Governance:

• Conduct financial forecasting and reviews for Azure and Dynamics.
• Manage Microsoft licensing/pricing (PAYG/RI), cost calculators, and cost alerts.
• Work with finops to ensure proper right sizing and waste reductions.
• Leverage automation/AI to reduce dynamics licensing waste.

Security & Compliance:

• Improve platform security by remediating NIST violations.
• Ensure standards are enforced by deploying custom Azure policies to block non-compliant infrastructure.

Team Mentorship:

• Upskill the team in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps principles.
• Proactively encourage the integration of Copilot and AI/Agentic solutions.

Infrastructure Vetting:

• Review and vet Azure infrastructure requests to ensure proper business justification.
• Collaborate with Architecture teams on design/solution reviews.

Management of Dynamics SaaS platform:

• Assist customers with onboarding and answering technical questions related to the Dynamics platform.

HA/DR:

• Define and document backup strategies for Azure hosted solutions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a closely related technical discipline.
• Strong leadership skills with preferably 3+ years of proven leadership experience.
• Experience managing teams in a 24x7 global support environment and on-call rotation.
• Proven ability to take an ownership role in projects, driving tasks to completion through PI planning and agile methodologies.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in Cloud infrastructure & service management and administration (Azure; AWS or GCP experience is a plus).
• Deep understanding of NIST Security Standards and remediation strategies.
• Firm grasp of Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD), including Roles, API Permission grants, Elevated Permissions, and Privileged Identity Management (PIM).
• Experience implementing and managing Azure Policy at scale.
• Proficiency in the following languages and tools is required to drive the team’s automation goals:
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, ARM templates.
• Scripting: Go (Golang), PowerShell, and Python.
• Data & Documentation: JSON, MSGraph, and Markdown.
• Understanding of basic AI principles and best practices.
• Knowledge of data privacy, model hallucination, model reasoning/response complexity and tokenization, prompt engineering, Agentic, Copilot/Copilot Studio, Azure Open AI.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, and prescription drug coverage.
• Flexible family care, parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care 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.