Technical Product Manager

The Role This position sits at the center of Ford Credit’s Financial/Accounting operations. You will own the Core Platform Finance/Accounting suite—the mainframe systems responsible for our General Ledger and accounting logic.

Your mandate is three-fold: Operational Stability, Platform Evolution, and Delivery Management.

We are not looking for someone to simply "keep the lights on." We need a technical expert who treats these systems as a critical asset requiring active lifecycle management. You will be responsible for maintaining absolute operational stability while driving a roadmap of technical upgrades, compliance enhancements, and business-critical developments .

This involves managing a rigorous roadmap of technical upgrades and business enhancements while holding our vendor engineering partners accountable for quality and delivery. You will serve as a trusted advisor to Finance business leadership, ensuring that their business goals are translated into reliable technical reality.

The Expectation You will operate at the intersection of Finance and Engineering. You need the experience to manage the rigorous demands of an audit-compliant environment and the technical depth to partner with mainframe engineers.

While operational excellence is your primary mandate, you will also drive efficiency. We expect you to leverage modern tooling—including GenAI—to streamline maintenance, automate testing, and modernize our development practices without compromising the integrity of the ledger.

Required Experience

• 10-15 Years Experience: Solid track record in Technical Product Management or Engineering Leadership, preferably within Financial Services or Banking.

• Mainframe Literacy: Functional knowledge of mainframe stacks (COBOL, JCL, CICS, DB2). You need to know enough to validate work estimates and challenge technical assumptions.

• Vendor Management: Proven experience managing outsourced or offshore engineering teams. You know how to drive performance and maintain quality control with external partners.

• Financial Domain: Experience with General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, or similar financial transaction systems is critical.

Professional Attributes

• Structured & Disciplined: You bring order to chaos. You document decisions, track dependencies, and refuse to let details slip through the cracks.

• Strong Communicator: You can tailor your message for the audience—whether it’s a technical deep-dive with developers or a risk assessment for senior management.

• High Accountability: You own the outcome, regardless of who writes the code. You are proactive in identifying risks before they become issues.

• Collaborative Driver: You can build strong relationships with business partners while maintaining the firmness required to manage vendor deliverables.

• Platform Lifecycle & Stability: Own the end-to-end health of the application suite. Drive the strategy for technical refreshes, compliance patching, and disaster recovery, ensuring absolute uptime for critical financial periods.

• Vendor Partner Management: Direct the work of extended vendor engineering teams. You define the "What" and "When," and hold partners accountable for the "How." You are responsible for enforcing code quality standards and delivery timelines.

• Stakeholder Partnership: Act as the primary technical counterpart to Finance and Accounting leadership. You will manage expectations, provide transparent status reporting, and translate complex business requirements into actionable technical backlogs.

• Major Enhancements: Lead the execution of large-scale business initiatives (e.g., regulatory changes, new platform/product launches) from concept to production deployment.

• Modernization Strategy: Identify opportunities to leverage GenAI to streamline workflows—specifically in automated testing, code documentation, and defect analysis—to reduce operational toil.