Lead Platform Engineer, Agentic Issue Resolution (AIR)

Ford Motor • Redford, MI

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

Ford’s Advanced Industrial Technology and Platforms (ATP) organization builds and scales industrial platforms, technologies, and capabilities for manufacturing. The Lead Platform Engineer will lead the design and development of AIR (Agentic Issue Resolution), an AI platform that helps plant teams investigate and resolve production issues. AIR gathers approved evidence from plant systems, connects it with existing plant knowledge, and recommends fixes for human review and approval. Confirmed fixes are saved for reuse across plants.

The role defines AIR’s architecture across user experience, workflow orchestration, agents, tools, knowledge, evaluation, and feedback. It also establishes how agents use approved, permissioned interfaces to interact with tools and plant systems, while ensuring investigations rely on authorized evidence and provide traceable recommendations. The platform must meet security, reliability, and production-readiness standards.

The engineer will define APIs and data contracts with CoreMesh, FPS+, and InZone; incorporate identity, permissions, audit logging, human approval, and escalation; and establish standards for testing, versioning, release, rollback, monitoring, and production support. The position leads AIR’s AI agent and evaluation engineers, runs design reviews, coaches data scientists, and partners with MLOps and evaluation engineers to measure and monitor agent behavior.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years building production software platforms or distributed systems, including technical leadership.
• Hands-on experience building applications on large language models, including agent workflows, orchestration, retrieval, and tool integration.
• Strong API and service design, testing, and maintainable-code skills in Python, TypeScript, Go, or Java.
• Experience designing secure systems with authorization, audit logging, and operational controls.
• Clear communication with engineering, data, security, and plant teams.

Nice To Haves

• Manufacturing, quality, maintenance, or industrial operations experience.
• Knowledge graphs, ontologies, semantic search, or case-based reasoning.
• Event-driven systems, workflow engines, and production observability.
• Human-in-the-loop design for operational decisions.
• Google Cloud Platform experience.

Responsibilities

• Define AIR platform architecture across user experience, workflow orchestration, agents, tools, knowledge, evaluation, and feedback.
• Build reusable components for issue intake, investigation planning, evidence retrieval, analysis, recommendations, and follow-up.
• Define how agents call tools and plant systems through approved, permissioned interfaces.
• Ensure investigations retrieve authorized sources, distinguish evidence from inference, and show the source behind each claim.
• Work with plant experts to translate problem-solving practices into modular, measurable workflows.
• Capture validated fixes as reusable records that other plants can apply.
• Define APIs and data contracts with CoreMesh, FPS+, and InZone.
• Build identity, permissions, audit logging, human approval steps, and clear escalation when the system is unsure.
• Set standards for testing, versioning, release, rollback, monitoring, and production support.
• Lead AIR team AI agent and evaluation engineers, run design reviews, and coach data scientists building agents.
• Partner with MLOps and evaluation engineers to measure agent behavior before release and monitor it afterward.

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.
• 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