Director, Strategy & Operations

The Director, Strategy & Operations will act as a business strategist for the Software Factory, defining how software is built, deployed, and maintained at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Establish and govern a predictable software release operating model, including go/no-go processes, release calendars, and delivery rituals.
• Lead release preparation, deployment readiness activities, and early warranty/hyper-care support while driving long-term automation of these workflows.
• Define operational standards for reliability, security, scalability, and delivery consistency across engineering teams.
• Partner with engineering leaders and product managers to align delivery capacity, roadmap timing, and market commitments.
• Translate technical issues, delivery risks, and environment instability into clear business impacts for executive stakeholders.
• Develop investment strategies for infrastructure, tooling, and vendor partnerships, including buy-versus-build decisions and ROI cases.
• Monitor and improve software factory performance through metrics such as deployment health, uptime, cost efficiency, and DORA performance.
• Identify bottlenecks and sources of manual toil across the delivery lifecycle, then drive process improvement and automation.
• Lead operational reviews using data to assess system health, release performance, and budget adherence.
• Build and scale a high-performing team to support release operations, operational governance, and analytics.

Qualifications:

• Experience leading operational excellence in a high-stakes delivery or production environment, ideally using Lean, Six Sigma, or similar frameworks.
• Strong understanding of software delivery operations, release management, DevOps practices, and CI/CD transformation.
• Demonstrated ability to build business cases and connect engineering investments to financial outcomes such as productivity, speed, and cost efficiency.
• Experience managing vendor, SaaS, cloud, or managed service relationships, including performance accountability through SLAs.
• Strong change management capability, with the ability to move organizations from manual, hero-based processes to standardized, automated operating models.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, product, finance, procurement, and executive leadership.
• Strong analytical skills with experience using operational metrics and dashboards to drive performance improvement.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and modern software delivery environments.
• Automotive industry experience is helpful but not required; candidates can learn domain-specific complexities such as OTA, telematics, and hardware/software integration on the job.
• Prior experience building or scaling teams in release operations, platform operations, or engineering business operations is preferred.

Benefits:

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare 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.