Virtualization Platform Automation Engineer and Admin

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced VMware and OpenShift Virtualization Developer (Automation), Engineer and Administrator to join our dynamic Globally positioned, on premises cloud platform team. In this role, you will be responsible for the design, automating, implementation, administration, and ongoing management of our Virtualization services. You will ensure the stability, performance, and security of our virtualized workloads, leveraging your expertise in VMware and OpenShift virtualization technologies. This position requires a strong understanding of automation, automation principles and a commitment to operational excellence.

Required Qualifications:

• Associate's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrates ownership, continuous improvement, security awareness, and commitment to quality and discipline, collaborates effectively, adapts to new challenges, and takes accountability for outcomes.
• 8+ Proficiency and programming experience in scripting languages (e.g., Bash, PowerShell, Python) for automation
• 8+ years of experience as a developer (automation) and IT infrastructure specializing in Virtualization solutions (e.g. VMware)
• 2+ years focused on Kubernetes and/or OpenShift Virtualization.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Ansible, Terraform, or GitOps.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps methodologies.
• Proven experience with engineering, administering and automating (IaC) VMware in a production environment and a strong understanding of VMware concepts.
• Understand of OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt) and Kubernetes concepts.
• Experience with Linux administration and networking fundamentals.
• 8+ Proficiency and programming experience in scripting languages (e.g., Bash, PowerShell, Python) for automation
• Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace) and logging solutions.
• Solid understanding of virtualization concepts and technologies.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex issues across multiple layers of the stack.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience designing or consuming APIs.
• Familiar with Containers and deployment
• Understanding of repeatable, reviewable infrastructure and configuration changes.
• Awareness of service health, incident response, and preventing recurring operational issues.
• Experience handling authentication tokens and credentials securely.
• Experience writing and maintaining unit tests.
• Familiarity with GitOps principles and Git-based workflows.
• Experience using Git for version control and collaborative development.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly and work effectively with cross-functional teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Jenkins and/or Tekton.
• Experience with Ansible or similar configuration-management tools.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Information Technology, a related Engineering field or equivalent practical experience.
• Familiarity with software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS) solutions.

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply!

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, 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.

For a detailed look at our benefits, click here: https://fordcareers.co/GSR
This position ranges from salary grade 6-8 and ranges from $85,400-$192,900.
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.

Visa sponsorship is NOT available for this position.
Relocation assistance is NOT provided for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.

#LI-Onsite #LI-DS2

Automation & Efficiency

• Develop automation solutions (scripts, playbooks) for repetitive virtualization tasks, including configuration changes, auditing, remediation and integration with ticketing systems.
• Leverage automation to enable delivering operator updates and changes efficiently at scale.
• Implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and practices to improve overall platform stability, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Role Based Access Control deployment and auditing.
• Namespace and Resource Quota management. 
• Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools using PowerShell, Bash, Python, and C.
• Design, consume, and troubleshoot APIs to connect services and automate workflows.
• Work securely with authentication tokens and credentials, following established security practices.
• Write and maintain unit tests to verify code behavior and prevent regressions.
• Build and support GitOps workflows for managing configuration, deployments, and infrastructure changes.
• Automate build, test, deployment, and operational processes.
• Troubleshoot issues across scripts, applications, APIs, and automation pipelines.
• Collaborate with other developers, operations teams, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver solutions.
• Document tools, integrations, tests, and procedures.
• Follow software development best practices, including version control, code review, testing, and maintainable code.
• Ability to use Artificial Intelligent (AI) tools to support coding, troubleshooting, documentation, and workflow improvement, while independently reviewing and testing generated outputs.
• Understand responsible AI practices, including protecting confidential information, credentials, and proprietary code.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI and automation effectively, using human judgment and oversight.

Observability, Monitoring, logging and Troubleshooting

• Implement and maintain comprehensive end to end observability solutions (monitoring, logging, tracing) for the OSV environment, including integration with tools like Dynatrace and Prometheus/Grafana.
• Explore and implement Event Driven Architecture (EDA) for enhanced real time monitoring and response.
• Develop capabilities to flag and report abnormalities and identify "blind spots" in observability.
• Perform deep dive Root Cause Analysis (RCA), potentially utilizing available tooling, to quickly identify and resolve issues across the global compute environment.
  • Find the needle in a haystack/unhealthy bit(s) in the compute universe (Globally) for faster time to resolution.
• Monitor VM health, resource usage, and performance metrics proactively.
• Monitor for unusual activity that might indicate a compromise or misconfiguration.

Solution Design & Consulting

• Provide technical consulting and expertise to application teams requiring virtualization solutions.
• Design, implement, and validate custom or dedicated clusters and VM solutions for critical applications with unique or complex requirements (e.g., specialized appliances).

Capacity Management

• Conduct capacity planning and forecasting for the VMware and OpenShift Virtualization platforms, including compute, memory, storage, and network resources, to ensure scalability and prevent resource exhaustion.
• Analyze resource utilization trends and make recommendations for infrastructure scaling, consolidation, or optimization.
• Collaborate with application teams and stakeholders to understand future demand and project capacity needs.
• Develop and maintain capacity models and reports to support strategic planning.

Knowledge Management

• Create, maintain, and update comprehensive internal documentation and customer facing content on the Ford docs site to facilitate self service and clearly articulate platform capabilities.