Director – Vehicle Software Platform Architecture

Location: United States

We are the movers of the world and the makers of the future. At Ford, we're all a part of something bigger than ourselves. Are you ready to change the way the world moves? Ford's Systems and Core Architecture (SCA) team owns the strategy and execution of Ford's vehicle software platform — the foundation that vehicle programs build on to deliver differentiated products efficiently, reliably, and at scale.
 

This role leads the execution and application of Ford's vehicle software platform architecture strategy, including how that architecture connects to and works with the cloud. It is not a research or advisory role — it is the leader accountable for turning architectural vision into a working, adopted, governed platform that vehicle programs actually build on.
 

This leader believes deeply in a set of architectural principles that are foundational to modern, software-defined systems: that software should be decoupled from hardware wherever possible so each can evolve independently; that complex systems scale best when built in clear layers of abstraction rather than as tightly coupled monoliths; that structural design and configurable behavior should be kept separate so systems can be tuned and extended without being re-architected; that shared, common infrastructure for cross-cutting concerns (such as safety, security, performance, and connectivity) is more scalable than solving these problems repeatedly at the feature level; and that connectivity between the system and the cloud should be treated as a native architectural property rather than an afterthought. They bring both the conviction to champion these principles and the pragmatism to apply them in service of a real, evolving platform strategy.
 

Why we're open to candidates from beyond automotive: the underlying capabilities this role requires — architecting complex, distributed, software-defined systems that must scale across many products or deployed units, and building organizational alignment behind that architecture — are not unique to cars. We are equally interested in leaders who have built these capabilities in:

• Off-highway / heavy equipment
• Military / defense systems
• Aerospace
• Cloud / hyperscaler platforms — especially those who've architected large-scale, connected, distributed systems for fleets, IoT, or digital twins
• Other distributed, embedded, or cyber-physical domains — industrial automation, robotics, energy/grid, telecom, marine, rail — anywhere complex, software-defined systems have had to scale across many deployed variants
 

Ford's Systems and Core Architecture (SCA) team owns the strategy and execution of Ford's vehicle software platform — the foundation that vehicle programs build on to deliver differentiated products efficiently, reliably, and at scale.