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Chris Russell

Chris Russell

Enterprise Platform & Infrastructure | Cloud Strategy | Digital Transformation

Director, Product Development Platform @ Ford Motor Company

ExperienceContact
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17
Years in technology
~40
Engineers in the organization
12,000+
Cloud Run instances scaled to
12M+
Monthly requests through Apigee
Leadership

How I lead

Proven leader in managing and scaling high-performing global engineering teams, establishing CI/CD culture, and implementing an everything-as-code mentality, containerization and microservice frameworks at enterprise scale. I align technical strategy with organizational objectives through rigorous stakeholder engagement, budget oversight and governance framework design.

AI Portfolio Strategy

Enterprise AI governance frameworks, technology-radar evaluation of new models and agentic frameworks, and proof-of-concept to enablement.

AI FinOps

Cost attribution, model-tier efficiency and token-aware routing so AI spend is visible and defensible.

Platform Enablement

Multi-vendor and roadmap management, adoption programs, and cross-functional influence in matrixed organizations.

Skill Portfolio

Applied AI, cloud platforms, and the infrastructure under them

Agentic Systems

MCP server design and governance, multi-model routing and orchestration, tool calling, and autonomous multi-step agent workflows.

RAG & Token Economics

Enterprise RAG pipelines, plus token budgeting, prompt caching, and token-aware model-tier routing with Redis-backed usage tracking.

AI Governance & FinOps

Least-privilege tool permissions, sandboxed execution, audit and observability, cost attribution, and acceptable-use guardrails.

CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code

GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Tekton, Azure DevOps and GitLab pipelines; Terraform, Ansible and CloudFormation.

Containers & Cloud Platforms

Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift on GCP (GKE, Cloud Run) and AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda), with on-prem model serving where data residency demands it.

Enterprise Infrastructure

Networking, storage, virtualization and VDI at scale, plus PLM platforms like 3DEXPERIENCE and Teamcenter.

Experience

Where I have led

  1. Director, Product Development Platform

    May 2025 – Present
    Ford Motor Company · Dearborn, MI

    Lead the entire PDIT platform estate — Teamcenter, 3DEXPERIENCE and every ancillary PLM application and tool — as the enablement backbone of Ford's product-development ecosystem, directly supporting Project Synergy and the Universal EV Program.

    • Manage a ~40-person organization through five manager-level reports spanning platform engineering, architecture, DevOps, cloud, software engineering and full-stack operations.
    • Built AI-assisted platform-operations tooling — Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and multi-model automation — for diagnostics and L1/L2 support deflection across the 3DX/PLM estate.
    • Deliver platform services fully embedded with the F-150, Expedition, Transit and other vehicle programs; the Universal EV Program is built entirely on this platform.
    • Consistently met committed deliverables while advancing Ford's core product-development objectives.
    3DEXPERIENCETeamcenterPLMMCPPlatform engineering

  2. Senior Manager, 3DX Platform

    Jan 2024 – May 2025
    Ford Motor Company

    Built and led the platform team responsible for Ford's 3DEXPERIENCE (3DX) platform, enabling Digital Thread and Ford's product-development digital transformation (now Project Synergy).

    • Led a major platform upgrade from 2022x to 2024x, replatforming to a greenfield, everything-as-code architecture.
    • Owned end-to-end 3DX platform management — leadership, Dev/GitOps, infrastructure and cloud — across three on-premises and five cloud-based 3DX environments.
    3DEXPERIENCEGitOpsEverything as code

  3. Manager, Cloud Platforms (Serverless)

    Jun 2022 – Jan 2024
    Ford Motor Company

    Joined Ford through the IT Leadership Program (ITLP); pioneered the enterprise Google Cloud Run and Cloud Functions serverless platforms to accelerate application modernization and migrate off Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VM architectures.

    • Built a team of 15+ engineers for current and long-term modernization.
    • Scaled serverless adoption from fewer than 200 to 12,000+ Cloud Run instances across all Ford business units, handling 12M+ monthly requests through Apigee.
    Google CloudCloud RunCloud FunctionsApigee

  4. Senior Manager, Infrastructure & Platform (Americas)

    Mar 2020 – May 2022
    Volvo Car

    Promoted from Infrastructure Specialist to own all traditional and cloud infrastructure across Volvo Cars Americas — datacenters, cloud, offices, ports of entry, training schools and annex sites across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Latin America.

    • Led a team of infrastructure engineers, product owners and data analysts; Americas lead for cloud transformation and continuous improvement across consumer and enterprise digital services.
    • Architected and delivered a $2.5M Dell EMC storage, compute and support contract for the Americas.
    • Designed and deployed two new ports of entry (Tacoma, WA and Brunswick, GA) and the full build-out of a new Americas headquarters in Mahwah, NJ.
    • Led the supplier transition from the primary to a new vendor for end-user and application support.
    • Owned change management and served as top escalation for all Americas — and select global — infrastructure and cloud incidents.
    Dell EMCCloud transformationVendor management

  5. Senior Infrastructure Specialist

    Feb 2019 – Mar 2020
    Volvo Car

    Lead infrastructure and cloud engineer for Volvo Cars Americas, responsible for traditional and cloud infrastructure across North America, LATAM, Canada and South America, including all SaaS and DevOps products.

    • Maintained the full virtualization platform, storage and compute, data aggregates and deployed network technologies.
    • Developed ITIL-aligned processes to improve operational structure across Volvo Cars.
    VMwareITILStorage

  6. Senior Solutions Architect

    Oct 2017 – Feb 2019
    Coretelligent

    Lead solutions architect for the greater New York City region and senior member of the principal team responsible for architecture, datacenter operations and 99.9% uptime across all client services, focused on financial-sector clients (venture capital, hedge funds, private equity).

    • Served as virtual CIO for high-profile clients — defining IT strategy and architecting and delivering complex solutions across cloud migrations, colocation and rebuilds.
    • Principal engineer and top (T3) escalation for all client and hosted-service support across Boston, San Francisco, New York City and Chicago.
    • Delivered white-glove client-facing service and hosted product management and deployment for financial-sector clients.
    Solutions architecturevCIOColocation

  7. Infrastructure Server Engineer

    Aug 2015 – Oct 2017
    YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP

    Enterprise technology team responsible for global corporate infrastructure — bare-metal servers, hypervisors, storage, colocation, networking, integration and automation — providing T3/T4 support to enterprise teams across the U.S., UK, Italy, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Japan.

    • Managed the North America and global estate, including budgets, procurement and assets for the Americas, and all enterprise storage (NetApp, EMC and 3PAR).
    • Administered Exchange, Skype for Business, VMware (Horizon, ESXi), Red Hat and backup/DR; redesigned the VMware Horizon VDI estate for high availability.
    • Led the Exchange 2010 hardware refresh and migration, the post-merger Active Directory redesign, and datacenter migrations across Italy (Bologna, Imola, Milan) and the UK.
    • Infrastructure project lead for new office openings in New Jersey, Los Angeles and Dubai, and the Tokyo server refresh.
    VMware HorizonNetAppExchangeDatacenter migration
Skills

Tools I reach for

Applied AI & Agentic Systems

Anthropic ClaudeOpenAI GPTGoogle GeminiGemini EnterpriseLlamaMistralModel Context ProtocolMulti-model routingTool callingRAGPythonFastAPI

Token & Context Management

Token budgetingContext-window optimizationPrompt cachingModel-tier routingRedis usage trackingQuantizationInference serving

AI Governance & Strategy

Least-privilege tool permissionsSandboxed executionAudit & observabilityAI FinOpsPortfolio strategyTechnology radarVendor & roadmap management

CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code

GitHub ActionsJenkinsTektonAzure DevOpsGitLab CI/CDTerraformAnsibleCloudFormationPuppetChefSaltStack

Containers & Cloud Platforms

DockerKubernetesOpenShiftGKECloud RunCloud FunctionsEventarcEC2S3CloudFrontECSEKSLambdaBatch

Observability, Security & Artifacts

PrometheusGrafanaDynatraceElastic StackSplunkGoogle Cloud MonitoringSAST/DASTPolicy as codeNexusJFrog ArtifactoryArtifact Registry

Network, Storage & Virtualization

CiscoHPEUbiquitiF5FortinetCheck PointVMwareHyper-VProxmoxvSANDell EMC IsilonNetAppHPE 3PARVeritas NetBackupVMware HorizonCitrix

Manufacturing & PLM

Dassault 3DEXPERIENCEENOVIA V5ENOVIA V6Siemens Teamcenter
Repositories

Code I maintain

Promptfolio

This site. A Next.js application that boots to a terminal, renders a JSON Resume document, ships as a container, and runs on my home lab with cloud-native tooling.

  • Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind 4
  • Multi-stage container image
  • Kubernetes probes and JSON API
Next.jsTypeScriptKubernetes
Education

Degrees and certifications

Bachelor of Science Information Technology

Michigan State University

Associate of Science Computer Information Systems

Henry Ford College (Cisco Network Academy)
  • Cloud Digital Leader
    Google Cloud
    2023
  • ITIL Foundation v3 / v4
    AXELOS
    2020
  • Cisco Academy Graduate
    Cisco Networking Academy, Michigan
  • Leaders in IT Group
    Michigan State University
Contact

Let's talk

Open to leadership roles across product development, applied AI and cloud platforms. The fastest way to reach me is email.

[email protected] chrisrussell.io GitHub LinkedIn