Job Description
The Opportunity
The Cloud Infrastructure Manager - Ford Energy will lead the execution, engineering, and day-to-day operational excellence of our multi-cloud environment and enterprise hosting platforms supporting Ford Energy initiatives. In this leadership role, you will have direct ownership of our cloud strategy execution-specifically focusing on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and mission-critical SAP S/4HANA cloud infrastructure powering next-generation energy, battery, and electrification supply chain systems.
Reporting to the Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations, this position plays a vital role in ensuring our enterprise cloud footprints remain secure, highly resilient, cost-effective, and fully optimized to support high-performance computing, manufacturing integration, and green energy operations. You will partner closely with Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, SAP/ERP teams, and strategic partners to bridge strategy with tactical execution.
Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities
1. What You'll Own
• Multi-Cloud Architecture & Operations: Lead the engineering, delivery, lifecycle management, and operational support across Azure and GCP environments tailored for Ford Energy platforms, ensuring optimal performance, scalability, and high availability.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Infrastructure: Oversee the technical foundation, stability, disaster recovery, and high-performance hosting requirements for enterprise SAP S/4HANA workloads supporting energy and supply chain management.
• Cloud Modernization & Automation: Drive initiatives focused on cloud optimization, workload migrations, automation, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and continuous improvement of cloud services tailored to manufacturing and energy demands.
• Governance & Cost Management: Implement robust FinOps practices to monitor cloud consumption, optimize spending, and enforce resource governance across Azure and GCP.
• Reliability & Resilience: Own availability, capacity planning, backup/recovery strategies, business continuity, and major incident resolution for all cloud-hosted energy platforms.
• Vendor & Partner Collaboration: Guide managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud platform account teams to ensure service level agreements (SLAs), operational hygiene, and accountability.
• Compliance & Security: Partner with Information Security and corporate governance teams to maintain strict security baselines, access controls, and audit readiness within a secure corporate environment.
2. Operations Experience
• 24/7 Production Operations & Reliability: Proven leadership in managing large-scale, mission-critical cloud production environments with strict uptime SLAs, ensuring continuous operational stability for global manufacturing and energy systems.
• Incident, Problem & Change Management: Direct experience establishing and running operational frameworks (ITIL-based) for major incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), proactive problem management, and change governance to minimize deployment risk.
• Monitoring, Observability & Telemetry: Hands-on oversight of enterprise monitoring, logging, and performance tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) to ensure early detection and proactive remediation of infrastructure bottlenecks.
• Patch Management & Lifecycle Hygiene: Drive systematic, automated patching schedules, vulnerability remediation cycles, and hardware/software end-of-life tracking across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Blended-Model Operations: Experience managing a matrixed operations model spanning internal engineering teams, third-party managed service providers (MSPs), and global vendor support lines to maintain accountability and fast mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).
3. What Success Looks Like
• Azure and GCP environments supporting Ford Energy are highly secure, stable, well-monitored, and fully documented.
• SAP S/4HANA infrastructure operates with exceptional uptime, fast recovery times, and peak performance to support business operations.
• Cloud spend is transparent, predictable, and continuously optimized through proactive cost management.
• Infrastructure changes, deployments, and patching cycles are automated, repeatable, and cause minimal business disruption.
• Cross-functional teams and external partners operate with clear lines of accountability and strong collaboration.
Qualifications
Qualifications & Experience
• Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in IT infrastructure, cloud engineering, and operations, with at least 3+ years in a dedicated cloud leadership or management capacity within enterprise environments.
• Cloud Expertise: Deep hands-on experience and architecture knowledge in Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enterprise environments (certifications preferred).
• Enterprise ERP Knowledge: Proven experience managing infrastructure, database sizing, high availability, and disaster recovery specifically for SAP S/4HANA or complex enterprise ERP systems hosted in the cloud.
• Technical Breadth: Strong background in compute, virtualization, Linux/Windows operating systems, enterprise storage, networking, backup/recovery, and infrastructure automation (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Vendor & Financial Management: Demonstrated experience managing cloud vendor relationships, managed service providers (MSPs), and cloud budgeting/FinOps.
• Industry Context: Familiarity with automotive, energy, manufacturing, or supply chain technology landscapes is a strong plus.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
Location & Travel
• Location: Dearborn, MI/Hybrid
Company
• As Ford establishes a wholly owned subsidiary focused on Battery Energy Storage Systems, this role will initially be employed by Ford and is expected to transition to the subsidiary within one year.
This position is leadership level 6 and ranges from $132,800-$250,800.
Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.
For more information on salary and benefits, click here: https://fordcareers.co/LL6
Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.
This position is hybrid with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week. #LI-Hybrid
Company: As Ford establishes a wholly owned subsidiary focused on Battery Energy Storage Systems, this role will initially be employed by Ford and is expected to transition to the subsidiary within one year.
#LI-GR1 #FordEnergy
