Director, Data Engineering and Architecture

Director, AI Readiness

At Ford, we believe freedom of movement drives human progress. To support this, we are transforming our data into an active, self-optimizing engine. This Director role will drive AI Readiness across the EDP by establishing engineering excellence, architectural standards, runbooks, and skills that all teams can leverage. This role is a critical enabler for the rest of the skill team and company, requiring a leader who can navigate the complexities of our enterprise-scale data.

You will lead teams in defining how data is ingested, transformed, and represented within the EDP. You will partner closely with other leaders to build a platform that is self-healing, cost-efficient, and capable of supporting autonomous systems that can query, reason, and execute tasks. This is a role for a strategic thinker who is comfortable discussing semantic ontologies, distributed systems, and the organizational change required to lead a large-scale data transformation.

Responsibilities

• Define the Vision for AI Readiness: Establish and document the enterprise standards for AI-Ready data, including semantic integrity, automated metadata tagging, high-fidelity pipelines, etc.
• Drive Platform Evolution & Modernization: Proactively identify and champion the adoption of next-generation technologies and cloud-native patterns. Act as a strategic catalyst for transitioning the EDP toward higher-maturity operating models, ensuring Ford remains at the cutting edge of data and AI innovation.
• Design and Build for Agentic Intelligence: Work cross-functionally within EDP to design and build data for AI agents to interpret without human intervention while ensuring consistency and context across the enterprise.
• Collaboration & Leadership: Lead and mentor an organization of Data Architects and Engineers. Working within the Data Platform and Engineering team to ensure solutions are scalable and executable.
• Privacy & Compliance by Design: Ensure development patterns enable Ford's rigorous commitment to data security and global privacy regulations.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Informatics, Data Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience: 12+ years of experience in Cloud-Based Data Architecture, Engineering or a related field, with experience in a leadership role.
• People Leader Experience: 3+ years of experience leading technology teams
• GCP Expertise: Deep technical proficiency in the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem, specifically BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage.
• Data Operations Background: Understand CI/CD, and site-reliability engineering principles as they apply to massive data platforms
• AI/ML Foundations: Strong understanding of modern AI requirements, including experience with Vector databases, LLM orchestration frameworks, and building data foundations for RAG-based applications.
• Strategic Modeling: Expert-level knowledge of data modeling (Relational, Dimensional, Graph) and the ability to define complex semantic ontologies for large-scale enterprises.
• Communication: Ability to translate complex architectural concepts into strategic business value for executive leadership.

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply! As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year's Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time

This position is leadership level 5 and ranges from $141,700-$268,300. Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.

Visa sponsorship is available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status.