PLM Operations Manager

Who We Are: We are the Product Development (PD) Platform Operations team, the driving force behind Ford's next-generation infrastructure and software solutions. Our mission is to build scalable, highly available environments that empower our engineers to design and build the vehicles of the future. We thrive on innovation, embracing cutting-edge technologies and methodologies like Infrastructure-as-Code, Configuration-as-Code (powered by Ansible), and cloud-native development – all while using CI/CD methodologies.

Why Join Us? Join a tight knit, rapidly growing team that values collaboration, continuous learning, and a passion for pushing technological boundaries. Be at the forefront of modernizing Ford's core Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) processes and have a direct impact on the tools our engineers use every day.

• Leadership: Lead a diverse, global team through the day-to-day operational support and service delivery of our platforms while driving continuous improvement initiatives.

• Service Support (L0–L2): Own the end-to-end support model across L0 through L2 tiers, ensuring rapid triage, resolution, and escalation of user issues for the 3DEXPERIENCE & Teamcenter platforms

• Incident & Problem Management: Lead incident response, coordinate resolution across teams, and drive root-cause analysis and problem management to prevent recurrence

• Monitoring & Observability: Design, implement, and maintain proactive monitoring, alerting, and observability across the platform ecosystem to detect and address issues before they impact users

• Data Analytics & Reporting: Build and maintain analytics, dashboards, and operational reporting (usage, performance, SLAs, service health) to drive data-informed decisions and surface actionable insights

• Communication: Own stakeholder and user communication, including incident notifications, service status updates, planned maintenance announcements, and executive reporting 

• Supplier Connectivity: Manage and maintain secure, reliable connectivity and integrations with suppliers and external partners, ensuring data exchange continuity across the PLM ecosystem

• Service Level Management: Define, track, and report against SLAs/OLAs, ensuring operational commitments are consistently met for Ford's global user base

• Continuous Improvement: Identify recurring issues and operational inefficiencies, driving automation and process improvements to reduce toil and improve service reliability 

• Vendor & Partner Management: Manage relationships with software vendors (Dassault Systèmes, Siemens) and service partners, coordinating support cases, escalations, and roadmap alignment

• Documentation & Knowledge Management: Build and maintain operational runbooks, knowledge base articles, and support documentation to enable consistent, scalable support 

• Collaboration: Partner closely with the platform engineering team, application developers, and security to ensure smooth handoffs between build and run functions

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent work experience

Experience

• 10+ years in operations, service delivery, application support, or a comparable platform-facing role

• 7+ years leading large teams in an operational discipline such as service management, application support, or platform operations

• 5+ years working with monitoring, observability, and operational analytics tooling and development

• Proven experience supporting product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms such as Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE and Siemens Teamcenter

• Demonstrated success operating large-scale, mission-critical applications within a 24/7 global support model

• Deep expertise in multi-tier support models (L0–L2) and in incident, problem, and change management aligned to ITIL (or an equivalent enterprise grade framework)

• Extensive hands-on experience with monitoring, logging, and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch)

• Proven track record of building operational dashboards, analytics, and reporting that drive service health and data-informed decision-making

Technical Skills

• Working knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and cloud-hosted application environments, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Networking

• Solid understanding of Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, and HAProxy as they apply to application performance troubleshooting

• Experience managing supplier and external partner connectivity, along with data exchange integrations

• Proven ability to lead diverse teams through complex incidents and deliverables while consistently meeting business expectations

• Financial acumen for managing SaaS subscriptions, licensing, and supplier relationships

• Experience partnering with senior leadership and cultivating strong business relationships

• Strong command of security best practices and principles

• Exceptional problem-solving and troubleshooting capabilities

• Excellent communication, collaboration, and presentation skills

• Experience thriving in a fast-paced, dynamic industrial systems environment such as Ford Motor Company

• Expert-level proficiency in leveraging large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence to enhance operational outcomes