Senior Hybrid Cloud Architect - (Data Center) at Ford
Dearborn, MI
$115,500–$218,100from the description
Aug 9, 2026
Dearborn, MI
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A people-management role at Ford leading a team of Infrastructure, Cloud, and Solution Architects responsible for global hybrid infrastructure spanning on-premises datacenters, GCP, and other public clouds. The manager is expected to remain hands-on — writing Terraform/Ansible IaC, building CI/CD pipelines, and guiding enterprise virtualization migrations from VMware to OpenShift — while also setting multi-year architectural strategy, publishing reference architectures, and advising C-suite stakeholders on cloud and AI/MLOps readiness.
Principal level · Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1 people in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 1–1
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $173,779 (middle half $136,334–$212,870). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 11, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
This role is classified as a people-management position (11-3021) because it explicitly requires directly managing, hiring, and conducting performance reviews for a team of Architects — classic line-management duties. However, the posting places unusually heavy emphasis on hands-on engineering (writing IaC, building CI/CD pipelines, OS-level troubleshooting), making 15-1252 Software Developers a genuine runner-up.
Seniority is assessed as Principal despite no explicit 'Principal' title: the role sets org-wide architectural direction, publishes enterprise standards, advises C-suite, and manages a specialized architecture practice — scope that clearly exceeds a typical Senior or Staff band.
VMware (vSphere/vCenter/vSAN/NSX) and OpenShift Virtualization are listed as an OR gate in the Mandatory Skillsets section ('Must have strong experience with either VMware … OR OpenShift Virtualization'). Both are marked required because the posting treats them as interchangeable gates on the same capability, not as separate independent requirements.
CI/CD tools (GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Tekton) are listed with 'e.g.' in the responsibilities section but appear as a hard gate in the Mandatory Skillsets block; GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins are marked required as named interchangeable options. Tekton appears only in the responsibilities narrative and is marked preferred.
ArgoCD and Flux appear only in the responsibilities narrative under GitOps, not in the Mandatory Skillsets block, so they are marked preferred.
Mainframe-related technologies (IBM z/OS, DB2, CICS) are listed in the responsibilities narrative; z/OS is explicitly called out in the Mandatory Skillsets as a required conceptual/integration familiarity, so it is marked required. DB2 and CICS appear only in the narrative and are marked preferred.
The role is hybrid with four or more onsite days per week at Ford's location; remote is set to false accordingly.
Visa sponsorship is explicitly unavailable.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): Datacenter operations.
Read the full posting
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