# Director of Engineering - Digital Products

**Company**: Ford Credit Europe
**Location**: Dunton
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Finance

**Apply**: https://efds.fa.em5.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1/job/61779
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_9a1ee741-a9d

## Description

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.

## Skills

### Required
- Cloud Native
- React Frontends
- Java Backends
- Google Cloud Platform
- Microservices
- Event-driven architectures
- GraphQL
- REST
- Kafka
- CI/CD
- Code quality
- Testing practices
- Branching strategy
- Code review processes