Software Development Manager

Ford of Canada's operations include a national headquarters, three vehicle assembly and engine manufacturing plants, three parts distribution centers, and three Connectivity and Innovation centers. Ford employs approximately 7,000 people in Canada, while an additional 18,000 people are employees in the more than 400 Ford and Ford-Lincoln dealerships across the country. For more information, please visit https://www.careers.ford.com.

In this position...

The Software Development Manager for the Telemetry & Observability Platform (TOP) leads the engineering team responsible for developing, integrating, deploying, and supporting the platform’s software capabilities. This role combines people leadership, technical oversight, and delivery accountability to ensure the team delivers secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable solutions aligned with the product roadmap.
 

The manager works closely with product management, architecture, cybersecurity, data, AI, vehicle software, manufacturing, service, and operations teams to translate product requirements into executable engineering plans. Responsibilities include workforce planning, recruitment, performance management, coaching, capacity management, delivery forecasting, technical governance, software quality, DevSecOps practices, production readiness, and operational reliability.

The role ensures that engineering work follows approved architecture, development standards, security controls, data-governance requirements, and AI-governance practices. The manager is also accountable for identifying delivery risks, managing technical debt, resolving dependencies, maintaining transparent delivery reporting, and developing the engineering skills required to support the platform’s long-term roadmap.

Success is measured through predictable delivery, software quality, platform reliability, security compliance, team health, engineering productivity, and the adoption and business value of delivered capabilities.

Responsibilities

What you'll do...

The primary responsibilities for this position include but are not limited to:

• Lead, coach, and develop the software engineering team supporting the Telemetry & Observability Platform.
• Translate the product roadmap and requirements into practical engineering plans, milestones, and resource needs.
• Manage team capacity, work allocation, delivery commitments, dependencies, and technical priorities.
• Recruit, onboard, retain, and manage the performance of software engineering talent.
• Establish clear engineering roles, objectives, development plans, and accountability.
• Ensure software solutions comply with approved architecture, security, privacy, data, and AI-governance standards.
• Oversee software design, development, integration, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Establish and maintain coding, peer-review, testing, documentation, and release-management standards.
• Drive DevSecOps, continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and automated testing practices.
• Ensure platform capabilities are scalable, reliable, maintainable, observable, and operationally supportable.
• Define and enforce release-readiness criteria, quality controls, and the engineering definition of done.
• Manage technical debt and balance feature delivery with reliability, security, architecture, and platform-health improvements.
• Identify and mitigate delivery, technical, operational, security, and staffing risks.
• Coordinate engineering dependencies across product, architecture, data, AI, cybersecurity, vehicle software, manufacturing, service, and operations teams.
• Establish production monitoring, incident management, root-cause analysis, and continuous-improvement practices.
• Track and report engineering performance using delivery, quality, reliability, security, productivity, and team-health measures.
• Maintain transparent communication on progress, capacity, risks, issues, and delivery forecasts.
• Promote engineering excellence, knowledge sharing, collaboration, inclusion, and continuous learning.
• Reduce critical knowledge concentration through documentation, cross-training, and succession planning.
• Support vendor and supplier technical delivery where third-party components or services are used.

Qualifications

You'll have...

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field of study.

Experience

• 8+ years of hands on experience with cloud/web based Software Development.
• 3+ years of demonstrated delivery of scalable, distributed, cloud-based/web based or mobile based data-intensive systems.
• 5 years of working knowledge of AWS/GCP/Azure or other equivalent cloud platforms in the domains of some or all of the following:
  • API and event-driven architectures.
  • Data ingestion and processing pipelines.
  • Cloud platforms and containerized workloads.
  • Continuous integration and continuous delivery.
  • Infrastructure as code.
  • Software testing and quality automation.
  • Observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and service monitoring.
  • Identity, access management, secrets, and security controls.
• 2 years of managing operational services and production incidents.
• 3 years experience working across architecture, product, security, data, and business teams.

Even better, you may have...

Experience:

• 5+ years of Cloud Software Development experience with focus on AWS/GCP application/ infrastructure development and management.
• Experience delivering at least 1 product or platform from requirements to delivery and maintenance for data intensive use cases.
• Telemetry, observability, or automotive cloud platform development experience.
• Experience leading software engineering teams in a product or platform environment.
• Observability platforms and Open Telemetry-based instrumentation.
• Large-scale telemetry, streaming, time-series, or analytical systems.
• AI/ML service integration for Software Development, model operations, or AI-governance controls.
• Safety, privacy, or compliance-sensitive software.
• Supplier integration and enterprise platform modernization.
• Effective coaching, performance-management, and communication skills.
• Ability to convert roadmaps into capacity-based delivery plans.

This posting is for an existing vacancy within our team.
 

We thank all candidates for their interest, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Successful candidates will be required to provide proof of degree completion for the highest level of education attained. If the degree was obtained from a school outside of Canada, an Education Credential Assessment report showing Canadian equivalency is also required.

Accommodations for applicants with disabilities throughout the recruitment, selection and/or assessment processes, where needed, are available upon request. Please inform Human Resources of the nature of any accommodation(s) that you may require.

Candidates for this position must be legally entitled to work in Canada. Ford Motor Company of Canada, Limited, does not sponsor work permit applications.

This position is hybrid with a requirement to be onsite for work four or more days per week.