Senior Hybrid Cloud Architect - (Data Center)

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 Eng