ATP Sense Engineering Manager

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical/Electronic Engineering or a related technical field.
• Demonstrated people-management experience leading software or data engineering teams - with direct accountability for performance, development, recruitment and team culture.
• Significant hands-on software engineering background (typically 8+ years) with the credibility to govern architecture and challenge technical decisions without owning every one.
• Experience delivering and operating production software - including CI/CD, release management, observability, incident management and a defined support model.
• Experience of cloud-native architecture (GCP preferred) and of integrating with operational technology: PLCs, industrial protocols (OPC-UA, MQTT, Modbus) and edge compute.
• Experience delivering AI/ML or data-intensive products into production, and working effectively with data scientists and data engineers.
• Proven capacity and prioritisation discipline - able to make trade-offs transparent and escalate constructively rather than over-commit the team.
• Strong global collaboration and stakeholder skills across multiple regions and time zones.
• Fluent professional English.

• Master's or PhD in a software, data or systems engineering discipline.
• Experience managing engineers embedded in a product-led operating model (stream-aligned teams, empowered Product Managers).
• Experience of manufacturing or industrial software at scale - MES, Maximo, digital twins, condition-based maintenance.
• Experience building an engineering function from a small base, including hiring plans and capability roadmaps.
• Experience in a matrixed corporate environment influencing without direct line authority.
• Additional European language (Spanish or German particularly valuable given team locations).

People-leadership role to build and lead the engineering organisation behind Ford ATP's parametric anomaly detection portfolio (Sense). You'll own the capability, capacity, technical integrity and operating health of software engineering across five Sense product streams - Machine, Tooling, Stamping, Energy and MILO - as they scale from proven plant value to global deployment. Your product is the engineering team and the technical system it owns, not the code you write personally. Part of the Sight Vertical within Advanced Industrial Technology & Platforms (ATP). Requires occasional international travel to Ford manufacturing sites.

• Lead, develop and grow the Sense Engineering Team - setting clear role, performance and development expectations for every engineer.
• Run regular one-to-ones, coaching, feedback and performance reviews, and build individual development and career plans.
• Recruit, onboard and retain engineering talent for approved positions, and identify capability and succession gaps before they become delivery risks.
• Create opportunities for engineers to develop technical leadership, delegating meaningful technical authority rather than making every decision personally.
• Build an inclusive culture of quality, learning, collaboration and production ownership, and actively monitor workload and burnout risk.
• Establish stable workstream-aligned engineering assignments where product priorities and capacity allow, and ensure each stream has sufficient technical ownership.
• Assign engineers to product streams with input from the Head of Product and Product Managers, making movement between streams explicit.
• Prevent engineers from being spread across too many concurrent priorities, balancing stable product context against the need for specialist support.
• Own the Sense Engineering strategy and technical roadmap, and establish architectural principles and proportionate technical standards.
• Ensure systems are scalable, reliable, secure, observable and maintainable across cloud, edge and plant environments.
• Make technical debt, obsolescence and architectural risk visible, and maintain lightweight architecture and decision-review practices.
• Partner with enterprise architecture, CoreDS, AIR, FPS+, cybersecurity and infrastructure teams, ensuring product and feature convergence choices are evidence-led rather than automatic.
• Make capacity and demand transparent across Build, Launch, Run and platform work, jointly with the Head of Product.
• Provide feasibility, effort, dependency and risk evidence before commitments are accepted, and maintain capacity guardrails and WIP limits.
• Escalate when portfolio demand cannot fit available capacity, and escalate valuable-but-unresourced work.
• Establish proportionate quality standards and Definitions of Done, with effective testing, code review, CI/CD and release control.
• Design and operate the Sense L2/L3 support model with clear L1/L2/L3 responsibilities, named technical owners, current runbooks and escalation paths.
• Establish incident management and learning-review practices, and prioritise elimination of recurring incidents.
• Implement and use engineering metrics to improve systems.
• Own technical deployment and commissioning readiness, reducing bespoke plant engineering through automation, reusable patterns and standards.
• Ensure infrastructure, identity, access, integration and security requirements are addressed ahead of each launch, partnering with plant, Launch and Reach teams.
• Own the integrity and completeness of Engineering evidence for MRL progression, ensuring evidence reflects genuine readiness rather than administrative completion.
• Embed engineers in product discovery from the beginning, so feasibility, data, integration, security and operational risks are examined early.
• Encourage engineers to engage directly with plant users at the GEMBA, and avoid substantial build commitments before critical technical assumptions are tested.
• Hold senior engineers accountable for mentoring and knowledge transfer, build communities of practice, and prevent specialists from becoming permanent bottlenecks.