Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer

Ford Motor Company • Redford Township, MI

14h • $132,800 - $250,800 • Onsite

About The Position

This role focuses on designing and evolving Ford's data mesh architecture across manufacturing and enterprise domains. The Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer will define domain boundaries, data product contracts, and interoperability standards. They will establish and maintain federated computational governance policies, ensuring consistency across decentralized teams. A key aspect of the role is championing the adoption of next-generation technologies and cloud-native patterns, such as GCP, Vertex AI, and agentic AI/LLM orchestration, to modernize legacy data workflows and achieve measurable business impact.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
• 5+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or advanced database design/modeling, including designing or implementing databases, data warehouses, or data marts — with exposure to large-scale manufacturing or industrial data environments.
• 15+ years of experience leading, managing, or mentoring technical teams (direct people leadership, matrixed leadership, or lead/owner roles directing cross-functional teams).
• Hands-on experience creating data models using data modeling tools.
• Deep, hands-on experience with GCP technologies including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataform, Data Fusion, Astronomer, or similar cloud data engineering tools.
• Demonstrated experience designing or implementing data mesh or domain-oriented data architectures.
• Understanding of AI/ML capabilities, with experience modeling semantic layers, knowledge graphs, or ontologies for a data platform.
• Knowledge of data governance, data quality, and data product marketplace enablement practices.
• Proficiency in SQL, Python, and modern data pipeline/orchestration tools.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across plant floor operations teams and enterprise IT/analytics functions.
• Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

Responsibilities

• Lead the transformation of raw data landing in cloud platforms from Manufacturing systems, into curated, documented, high-quality data products.
• Define and enforce data product standards: ownership, schema versioning, SLAs for freshness/completeness/accuracy, discoverability, and access controls.
• Oversee the build-out of ingestion, transformation, and publishing pipelines (batch and streaming) that convert raw operational data into standardized, reusable data assets.
• Design and build data structures and semantic layers (ontologies, knowledge graphs) that enable AI agents to interpret enterprise data consistently and with minimal human intervention.
• Design and develop data models (enterprise, conceptual, logical, and physical) for assigned domains; manage and maintain models in a shared repository.
• Partner with product and analytics teams to translate use cases into data requirements, providing architecture guidance, data models, and design reviews.
• Establish and enforce data architecture principles, standards, and best practices across the team's data products (catalog, lineage, observability, security, interoperability).
• Drive data quality initiatives: profile source-system data, define data quality requirements and metrics, and guide monitoring, measurement, reporting, and remediation.
• Drive adoption of cloud services like GCP as the technical backbone of the data mesh and data product ecosystem.
• Evaluate and implement metadata management and data catalog solutions to support discoverability and trust across the mesh.
• Establish monitoring, observability, and SLA-tracking for published data products.
• Own and evolve the federated governance framework, balancing global standards with domain-level autonomy, ensuring compliance with Ford's data security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
• Implement automated policy enforcement (schema validation, access control, metadata cataloging, lineage tracking) via GCP-native and third-party tooling.
• Partner with cybersecurity, legal, and compliance teams to classify and protect sensitive manufacturing and enterprise data.
• Ensure development patterns support Ford's data security requirements and global privacy regulations (privacy and compliance by design).

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