AI Engineer, Industrial Systems Data Platform (ISDP)

Ford Motor • Dearborn, MI

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

Enterprise Technology plays a critical part in shaping the future of mobility. If you’re looking for the chance to leverage advanced technology to redefine the transportation landscape, enhance the customer experience and improve people’s lives, this is the opportunity for you. Join us and challenge your IT expertise and analytical skills to help create vehicles that are as smart as you are. Ford's Industrial Systems Data Platform (ISDP) unifies data from Product Development, Manufacturing, Quality, and Supply Chain applications into a single logical data model. We are building an AI-queryable knowledge graph over that data — a BigQuery property graph derived from a canonical domain event store — and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets agents reason over it. We're looking for an AI Engineer to own this system end to end: design, develop, test, and deploy the graph layer to Production on a Google Cloud Platform–native stack , and build the agent-facing serving layer on top of it. You will turn raw industrial event data into a governed, traversable graph that powers Ford's next generation of engineering, manufacturing, quality, and supply-chain agents.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or Engineering or equivalent combination of education & experience
• 5+ years of experience with Strong software engineering in Java , Python , with production-grade testing, CI/CD, and code quality practices.
• 3+ years of experience with Hands-on experience deploying data/AI systems to Production on a GCP-native stack : Vertex AI, BigQuery , Dataflow / Apache Beam , Pub/Sub , Cloud Run / GKE , Cloud Storage , and Cloud Build / Artifact Registry .
• 3+ years of experience with graph data modeling and querying — property graphs and GQL / graph query patterns (BigQuery property graphs, or equivalent such as Neo4j/Spanner Graph).
• 3+ years of Hands-on experience with Vertex AI (Agents, model serving, embeddings) and evaluation of agent answer quality.
• 2+ years of Experience building LLM/agent systems: tool-use, RAG/grounding, and integrating models via APIs (e.g., Vertex AI or enterprise LLM gateways).
• Familiarity with MCP or comparable agent tool protocols.
• Observability expertise: Cloud Monitoring/Logging, OpenTelemetry, SLOs, dashboards, and alerting for data pipelines and services.
• 3+ years of experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and secure-by-default engineering (IAM, least privilege, secrets management).
• Ability to work directly with data producers to model and validate real-world industrial/enterprise data .

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Dataplex / Data Catalog for governance, lineage, and business glossaries.
• Streaming/CDC and event-driven architectures; append-only/event-sourced data modeling.
• Design and build user-facing applications and dashboards that surface Knowledge Graph data to end users.
• Domain exposure to PLM / product development, manufacturing execution, quality, or supply-chain systems and their data.
• Data quality frameworks, schema evolution, and blue-green/zero-downtime data deployments.

Responsibilities

• Graph Layer Design, develop, test, and deploy the ISDP knowledge graph from the domain event store to Production using cloud-native data pipelines.
• Model and evolve the graph's entities and relationships as new data sources are onboarded.
• MCP serving layer Design, build, and operate the MCP server that exposes the ISDP graph layer and event store as tools to consumers — including GQL graph query, event-store query, and schema/DDL discovery.
• Define tool contracts, context, and guardrails so agents produce grounded, accurate, non-hallucinated responses over the graph.
• Ensure low-latency, secure, and cost-efficient serving for interactive and batch agent workloads.
• Reliability, monitoring & observability Own monitoring and observability of the graph layer and the MCP server — data freshness, pipeline health, query latency/cost, tool-call success rates, and answer quality.
• Instrument SLOs, dashboards, alerting, and tracing; drive incident response and continuous reliability improvements.
• Collaboration & data onboarding Partner with Data Engineers and Application Data Source Owners across Product Development, Manufacturing, Quality, and Supply Chain to ingest and validate their data into ISDP .
• Establish data contracts, schema validation, and quality checks; support source owners through onboarding, mapping to the ISDP logical model, and troubleshooting.
• Contribute to data governance, cataloging, and lineage for the graph and its sources.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree