Hardware Development Engineer-Sight Vertical

Ford Motor Company • Redford Charter Township, MI

2d • $85,400 - $192,900 • Onsite

About The Position

Ford Motor Company is undergoing a historic industrial shift, moving from building great vehicles to building great systems that scale across them. The Advanced Industrial Technology & Platforms (AITP) organisation was created to operationalise this shift. ATP is a new, centralised organisation designed to position Ford to lead industrial innovation, accelerating our digital evolution and manufacturing excellence. The Sight Vertical within AITP is responsible for building an end-to-end business around AI/ML anomaly detection products, operating as two product families: Sight.Sense (detecting anomalies in parametric data) and Sight.Vision (detecting anomalies in image data). These product portfolios converge on the Sight Anomaly Platform, which builds on Ford's Core Systems layer to deliver quality assurance and zero-downtime, zero-defect manufacturing. This role is a vertical-level position working across both product families, with a matrix reporting line into ATP Core for alignment with enterprise standards. The Hardware Engineer will own the hardware backbone of manufacturing intelligence products, spanning specification, sourcing, testing, safety, regulatory certification, and fleet management.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechatronics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience specifying, testing or deploying industrial cameras, machine vision hardware, industrial sensors and data-acquisition hardware, or edge compute devices.
• Working knowledge of industrial networking concepts — Ethernet/GigE, network switches, jumbo frames and packet-level troubleshooting — and of protocols including Dynamic DNS, DHCP and TCP/IP.
• Familiarity with safety and regulatory certification processes (UL, cUL, CE) for electrical and electronic hardware.
• Experience with messaging and integration protocols common in industrial vision systems (for example MQTT) and PLC interfacing concepts.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills; comfortable working with software engineers, product managers and plant-floor personnel.
• Experience retrofitting hardware onto in-production manufacturing equipment without disrupting output.
• Fluent professional English.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with industrial PCs and NVIDIA products for AI applications.
• Experience supporting hardware fleets at scale across multiple manufacturing sites.
• Familiarity with cloud image storage and retention pipelines (for example GCP) as they relate to hardware warranty and data lifecycle policy.
• Manufacturing or automotive plant-floor experience.
• Experience developing and governing hardware standards — device, BOM and installation standards, distinct from controls standards.
• Experience with parametric condition monitoring — vibration, current, temperature, pressure or energy metering — and its acquisition hardware.
• Familiarity with OT network segmentation and plant-floor connectivity constraints.
• Additional European language (Spanish or German).

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end camera specification for vision inspection stations, including resolution tier selection, lens selection, field-of-view and working-distance calculations, and lighting requirements for target part geometry.
• Evaluate and qualify camera vendors and models against plant-floor environmental conditions — vibration, dust, temperature and wash-down requirements.
• Define and maintain hardware bill-of-materials (BOM) standards for repeatable, scalable station builds across plants.
• Own end-to-end specification for sensing and signal-acquisition hardware used by Sense products, including sensor selection, mounting and retrofit approach, signal conditioning, and acquisition rate requirements for the target parameter.
• Evaluate and qualify sensor and data-acquisition vendors against the same plant-floor environmental conditions applied to vision hardware.
• Define and maintain hardware BOM standards for repeatable Sense installations — including retrofit onto existing machine, tooling, press and energy assets, where hardware must be added without disturbing production equipment.
• Establish the hardware pattern that allows Sense deployments to proceed with minimal bespoke plant engineering, in support of deployment cycle-time reduction.
• Specify, test and validate edge compute devices (industrial PCs and edge boxes) that host vision inference and messaging — for example MQTT broker and client architecture — between cameras and plant control systems, and that host parameter acquisition and buffering for Sense products.
• Own hardware-side network requirements, specification and validation, including wired plant-Ethernet connectivity from camera to switch, GigE configuration and validation under production load, and jumbo-frame/packet-loss testing during image capture and transfer.
• Apply working knowledge of networking protocols including Dynamic DNS, DHCP and TCP/IP.
• Specify and test the hardware side of controls interfaces — for example pass/fail signal handoff and parameter tag access — working to the controls interface standard set by the Controls Engineer, and partner with software engineering on PLC integration requirements.
• Specify power supply mechanisms, power drops and supporting infrastructure required by fielded hardware.
• Manage edge device procurement requests and lifecycle — requisitioning, provisioning and refresh cycles — in coordination with programme and IT stakeholders.
• Develop hardware strategies for both standalone Sight Vision/Sense deployments and joint deployments with shared equipment and infrastructure.
• Lead hardware validation and test protocols for new camera, sensor and edge device deployments prior to plant rollout, including environmental, network and integration testing.
• Own UL, cUL and CE certification requirements and compliance documentation for all fielded hardware, coordinating with vendors and Ford EHS and safety stakeholders as needed.
• Support Cyber Security, OGC and Corporate Ergonomics review and sign-off processes required for new vision and sensing hardware deployments.
• Provide hardware evidence in support of TRL and MRL maturity gates for both product families, with per-deployment evidence remaining with the deploying launch engineer.
• Establish and maintain fleet management practices for deployed camera, sensor and edge hardware across the plant network — inventory, firmware and health monitoring, certificate management, warranty tracking, and end-of-life replacement planning.
• Define hardware-side capture, buffering and egress requirements that data storage and retention design must accommodate.
• Serve as the hardware escalation point beyond field first response for plant-floor issues tied to cameras, sensors, edge devices, or network connectivity; drive root cause analysis and corrective actions.
• Drive recurring hardware failure modes out of the fleet through standard changes rather than per-site fixes.
• Maintain the primary near-term focus: Sight.IQ hardware specification, deployment and sustaining support, and Sense hardware standardisation for products currently deploying.
• Extend hardware engineering support to other Sight vision products — for example Vision.Scout and StampGuard — as deployment scope grows.
• Serve Sense product lines directly, applying the same specification, testing and fleet-management discipline across both families and reusing common patterns wherever the sensing problem allows.
• Collaborate with the Applied AI Vision Lead Engineer, the Sense and Vision Heads of Product Family and Product Management to translate product and algorithm requirements into hardware specifications.
• Report into the Sight Vertical Director, with a matrix working relationship into ATP Core and the relevant hardware, controls, cybersecurity and infrastructure experts.
• Work across Sight.Sense and Sight.Vision product streams as a senior individual contributor, supporting the product engineering teams and working closely with the Applied AI Vision Lead, the Heads of Product Family for Sense and Vision, Software Engineering, and plant deployment teams to get camera, sensor and edge hardware from specification to shop-floor reality.
• Partner with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, the Software Architect, Controls Engineer, Data Engineer, Launch and Deployment Engineers, plant controls teams, plant IT and vendors.
• Requires availability to travel internationally to Ford manufacturing sites, ATP hubs and supplier or equipment run-off locations as required.

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: Senior