AI Engineer

Ford Motor Company • Dearborn, MI

3d • $99,600 - $192,900 • Hybrid

About The Position

Ford's Industrial Systems Data Platform (ISDP) unifies data from Product Development, Manufacturing, Quality, and Supply Chain applications into a single logical data model. Ford is 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 enables agents to reason over it.

The AI Engineer will own this system end to end: designing, developing, testing, and deploying the graph layer to production on a Google Cloud Platform–native stack, and building the agent-facing serving layer. The role turns raw industrial event data into a governed, traversable graph that powers engineering, manufacturing, quality, and supply-chain agents.

The role also partners with data engineers and application data source owners to onboard and validate data, establish data contracts and quality checks, and contribute to governance, cataloging, and lineage. The position is hybrid, with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience with strong software engineering in Java and Python, including production-grade testing, CI/CD, and code quality practices.
• 3+ years of experience deploying data or AI systems to production on a GCP-native stack, including 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, including 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, including agents, model serving, embeddings, and evaluation of agent answer quality.
• 2+ years of experience building LLM/agent systems, including tool use, RAG/grounding, and integrating models via APIs such as Vertex AI or enterprise LLM gateways.
• Familiarity with MCP or comparable agent tool protocols.
• Expertise in observability, including 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, including IAM, least privilege, and secrets management.
• Ability to work directly with data producers to model and validate real-world industrial or enterprise data.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States; employment eligibility will be verified at hire.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Dataplex/Data Catalog for governance, lineage, and business glossaries.
• Experience with streaming/CDC and event-driven architectures, including append-only/event-sourced data modeling.
• Experience designing and building 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.
• Experience with data quality frameworks, schema evolution, and blue-green/zero-downtime data deployments.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and deploy the ISDP knowledge graph from the domain event store to production using cloud-native data pipelines.
• Model and evolve graph entities and relationships as new data sources are onboarded.
• Design, build, and operate the MCP server that exposes the ISDP graph layer and event store as tools, including GQL graph query, event-store query, and schema/DDL discovery.
• Define tool contracts, context, and guardrails so agents produce grounded, accurate responses over the graph.
• Ensure low-latency, secure, and cost-efficient serving for interactive and batch agent workloads.
• Own monitoring and observability of the graph layer and MCP server, including data freshness, pipeline health, query latency and cost, tool-call success rates, and answer quality.
• Instrument SLOs, dashboards, alerting, and tracing; drive incident response and continuous reliability improvements.
• Partner with data engineers and application data source owners across Product Development, Manufacturing, Quality, and Supply Chain to ingest and validate 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.
• Paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, and subsidized back-up child care.
• Family-building benefits, including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement and fertility treatments.
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members, and management leases.
• Tuition assistance.
• Employee resource groups.
• Paid time off for individual and team community service.
• Generous vacation time, sick/personal time, and paid holidays, including between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed