Director of Engineering - Digital Products

We're looking for a hands-on, transformative engineering leader to own digital products & originations for Ford Credit Europe. As the Director of Engineering for Digital Products & Originations, you will oversee the digital products that power our customer-facing Originations and dealer experiences across Europe. Managing an engineering organization of 50+ across the UK, Germany, Spain, and India, you will bridge the gap between traditional banking rigour and fintech agility. This isn't just about maintaining systems; it's about creating the future of how millions of customers interact with Ford.

Responsibilities

Organizational Leadership & Strategy

• Build the Team: Directly manage and mentor a group of Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers. You are responsible for the organizational design, hiring strategy, and career progression of a 50+ person engineering team.
• Culture of Excellence: Instil a culture of technical craftsmanship. Shift the mindset from 'project thinking' to 'product/customer thinking', ensuring teams take long-term ownership of their code, quality, and technical debt.
• Resource Management: Manage the engineering budget and headcount distribution, with a value-driven mindset, ensuring talent is deployed against the highest impact business priorities.

Technical Direction

• Modernize the Core: Drive the architectural strategy for decoupling and modernizing our digital products. You will oversee the transition from legacy systems to event-driven, cloud-native applications deployed on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Reliability & Scale: Ensure our platforms remain robust, secure, performant, and capable of 24/7 availability in a highly regulated environment.
• Engineering Craftsmanship: Own and enforce the software engineering standards (the 'building codes') for your domain. This includes code quality, testing practices, branching strategy, code review processes, and CI/CD configuration. You are accountable for the how of building high-quality, maintainable software.
• AI: Adopt and drive agentic AI to accelerate the SDLC and improve quality

Stakeholder & Business Partnership

• Bridge the Gap: Act as a technical partner to the Business Operations, Risk, and Finance leadership. You will translate complex technical constraints into business options and vice versa.
• Global Alignment: Collaborate with your counterparts in the US to ensure our European platforms integrate seamlessly with Ford's global ecosystem, while maintaining local market relevance.

Qualifications

Leadership Experience

• Engineering Leadership: 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5+ years in a senior leadership role (e.g., Head of Engineering, Director, or Senior Manager) managing other managers.
• Scale: Experience leading organizations of significant size (30+ engineers), including navigating the complexities of hiring, performance management, and organizational restructuring.
• Domain Expertise: Demonstrable experience building both 'power user' systems like our dealer-facing UIs, as well as easy-access UIs for end-customers.

Technical Fluency

• Cloud Native: While you may not code every day, you have a deep architectural understanding of modern cloud platforms (GCP preferred), microservices, and event-driven architectures, and can hold your own in a design review with a Staff Engineer, able to challenge effectively on design choices.
• React Frontends: 5+ years of experience building React applications.
• Java Backends: A background in the Java & Spring ecosystem, using GraphQL, REST, and Kafka for integration.
• Culture of curiosity: You will work with your teams to continuously improve skills, knowledge, and best practices.

Mindset

• Talent Magnet: You have a history of attracting top engineering talent and building diverse, high-performing teams.
• Technical Leadership: You provide inspirational tech direction to engineers, knowing what good looks like.
• Communication: You can relate complicated technical problems in a clear and jargon-free way, demystifying the tech for the executive team.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience with finance platforms (e.g., off-the-shelf banking software or custom-built ledgers).
• Google Cloud Professional Architect certification.
• Experience building vehicle finance and dealer application.