Director, Data Engineering and Architecture

Ford Motor • Dearborn, MI

1d • Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

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.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director