Staff Data Platform & Products Architect

Ford Motor • Dearborn, MI

7d • Hybrid

About The Position

Enterprise Technology plays a critical part in shaping the future of mobility. If you’re looking for the chance to leverage advanced technology to redefine the transportation landscape, enhance the customer experience and improve people’s lives, this is the opportunity for you. Join us and challenge your IT expertise and analytical skills to help create vehicles that are as smart as you are. Ford’s Electric Vehicles, Digital and Design (EVDD) team is charged with delivering the company’s vision of a fully electric transportation future. EVDD is customer-obsessed, entrepreneurial, and data-driven and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading customer experience for electric vehicle buyers and owners. You’ll join an agile team of doers pioneering our EV future by working collaboratively, staying focused on only what matters, and delivering excellence day in and day out. Join us to make positive change by building a better world where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
• 10+ years of progressive technical experience in data architecture, platform engineering, or enterprise-scale data engineering.
• 5+ years of experience designing and operating end-to-end data platforms on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS, or Azure.
• 5+ years of practical application development experience using Python, SQL, and Java (or Go/Bash) tailored for high-performance pipeline development, API creation, and automation scripting.
• 1+ year of experience leading the build out of a centralized developer ecosystem or developer-facing templating framework using Git submodules or standardized repositories.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or equivalent
• Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer or Professional Cloud Architect certifications.
• Experience designing, building, and deploying RESTful and gRPC APIs, including schema definition, authorization models, and API gateway integrations.
• Deep expertise in streaming and analytical data modeling (Star Schema, Data Vault) across cloud-native databases (BigQuery, BigTable, PostgreSQL).
• Proven experience building production streaming pipelines with Apache Beam/Dataflow and orchestrating distributed Spark/PySpark processing on Dataproc Serverless (including JVM tuning and performance optimization).
• Hands-on experience with Apache Airflow, including writing robust DAG design patterns and managing multi-environment orchestrator instances.
• Strong experience with GitHub Actions (or Tekton), Terraform, Docker/Buildah, and running workloads on containerized orchestration platforms like Cloud Run or GKE.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with a proven ability to explain complex technical and architectural concepts clearly to both technical engineers and business leaders.
• Live within reasonable commuting distance of Dearborn, MI to support a hybrid work model and/or willing to relocate to the area.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and govern highly performant, distributed data solutions on GCP, leveraging BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, BigTable, Cloud Storage, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, and Vertex AI to support global analytical, operational, and real-time streaming use cases.
• Design and implement high-volume, event-driven streaming pipelines using GCP Pub/Sub, Apache Beam, and Apache Kafka. Build real-time stream processing systems to ingest and land high-volume events into optimized BigQuery analytical layers and low-latency BigTable operational stores.
• Architect and implement secure, versioned, and highly performant RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform services and data products to internal and external consumers. Define API contracts, versioning strategies, and authentication/authorization patterns (OAuth, mTLS) to enable reliable self-service access.
• Champion data contract standardizations and shift-left data quality practices. Define and enforce data schemas using Protobuf and centralized Schema Registries, ensuring robust boundaries, backward compatibility, and semantic alignment across distributed producer and consumer teams.
• Design opinionated, extensible frameworks and libraries that abstract underlying infrastructure complexity. Enable product engineering teams to easily bootstrap and scaffold production-ready data pipelines and microservices through standardized templates, configuration-driven workflows, and automated code generation using Python and Jinja templating.
• Collaborate with business, product, and engineering leaders to translate organizational objectives into executable architectural roadmaps. Establish clear, clean boundaries between core platform responsibilities and feature-team domain boundaries.
• Lead the GitOps lifecycle by designing and maintaining Terraform (HCL) configurations and automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Tekton) to ensure consistent, secure, and rapid infrastructure deployments across Dev, QA, and Production environments.
• Design and govern modern data modeling patterns (such as dimensional modeling, Data Vault, and event-based streaming schemas) across analytical tables, relational databases, and flat-file stores. Orchestrate distributed Spark batch processing, complex SQL transformations, and ML training pipelines using Apache Airflow.
• Build, publish, and secure container images using Buildah and Docker, managing deployments to Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Automate container image promotion, environment progression, and artifact registry security through dedicated CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide hands-on mentorship and architectural guidance to data engineering teams. Establish best practices, design patterns, and style guides, while building developer-enablement tooling that minimizes onboarding friction and accelerates time-to-market.

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
• Education Level: Associate degree