Principal Product Manager - Core Data Systems (ATP)

Ford

20h • Hybrid

About The Position

We made history and now we work to transform the future – for our customers, our communities and our families. You'll see your work on the road every day, helping people move freely and pursue their dreams. At Ford, you can build more than vehicles. Come build what matters.

As part of our Manufacturing team, you’ll help build the world-class, state-of-the-art smart vehicles we're known for. In our plants around the world, we’re constantly developing new technologies and processes to further increase our efficiency. You'll get the satisfaction of making great products people use and love.
In this position...
Ford is building the next generation of technologies and capabilities for manufacturing — and data is at the center of making those systems smarter, safer, and more scalable. As a Principal Data Product Manager on Ford’s Advanced Industrial Technology & Platforms (ATP) team, you’ll lead the strategy and delivery of data products that power manufacturing technology products in production systems, robotics and automation, vision systems and additive manufacturing.
You’ll work across operations technology (OT) and enterprise IT to ensure data is captured, governed, and delivered in ways that are secure, reliable, and ready for scale across multiple sites.
Location: Dearborn area preferred. Hybrid is expected; remote considered for the most qualified candidates.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience in product management and/or building data products at scale.
• Track record delivering data products or platform capabilities used by multiple teams (not one-off dashboards).
• Strong understanding of data product fundamentals: event data, batch vs streaming, data modeling, metadata/lineage, and data quality/observability.
• Ability to translate complex, ambiguous problems into clear priorities, requirements, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong communication and stakeholder leadership skills, including comfort working with both executives and technical teams.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree or MBA.
• Experience with robotics, automation, or industrial telemetry data (uptime, MTTR, utilization, task success).
• Experience building products for vision/ML data (image/video pipelines, labeling workflows, dataset quality and versioning).
• Experience bridging OT and IT environments, including edge constraints and secure data movement.
• Familiarity with governance and security patterns (RBAC/ABAC, encryption, retention, audit controls) in enterprise settings.
• Experience enabling ML teams through well-designed data interfaces, training data practices, or MLOps-adjacent workflows.

Responsibilities

• Define the vision and roadmap for ATP’s core data systems products, aligned to business outcomes and platform scalability.
• Build and evolve data products such as: Robotics telemetry and event datasets (health, faults, tasks, utilization)
• Fleet and site performance datasets and metrics layers
• Vision datasets (images/video) with metadata, labeling workflows, and training-ready packaging
• APIs and curated datasets that enable analytics and ML teams to move faster
• Contextualization of data from the shopfloor and analytics.
• Partner with engineering, data science, and operations to define requirements for data quality, latency, reliability, and cost—especially for high-volume image/video data.
• Drive standardization across systems and suppliers by defining schemas and data contracts that work across sites and robotics platforms.
• Establish a clear approach to data access and governance across OT and IT environments (security, privacy, retention, auditability).
• Measure adoption and impact—tracking product usage, data quality and availability, and operational outcomes enabled by your data products.
• Lead cross-functional alignment and decision-making across manufacturing/operations, engineering, cybersecurity, IT, and key partners—without needing formal people leadership.

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: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees