Enterprise AI Architect & Platform Leader

Ford; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and drive secure, cloud-native, production-ready systems. This leadership-level role combines hands-on architecture with team development and cross-functional influence across technology, product, and security.

You will define target architectures, build reusable patterns, and oversee AI-native delivery, with Google Cloud services and strong emphasis on Zero-Trust, governance, and risk management.

Responsibilities

• Define Ford Credit's multi-year enterprise AI architecture strategy, target states, transition roadmaps, standards, and investment priorities.
• Establish an AI-native software delivery lifecycle built around explicit specifications, bounded execution, automated validation, evidence, and learning loops.
• Create reusable patterns for architecture manifests, technical plans, contracts, acceptance criteria, authority boundaries, escalation rules, and evidence bundles.
• Architect production agentic systems that integrate models, retrieval, tools, skills, memory, state, orchestration, permissions, evaluation, observability, and recovery.
• Define risk-tiered autonomy, checkpoints, pause gates, human oversight, and auditable decision trails for consequential actions.
• Establish evaluation practices spanning automated and regression testing, adversarial testing, human review, user acceptance, and production outcome monitoring.
• Set patterns for authoritative enterprise knowledge, including provenance, freshness, retrieval, versioning, structured context, and durable memory.
• Design and govern scalable AI applications and platforms on Google Cloud, with appropriate use of services such as Vertex AI, Gemini, GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub.
• Embed Zero-Trust principles, identity and access controls, data protection, software supply-chain security, and incident response into AI and cloud architectures.
• Address AI-specific risks, including prompt injection, data leakage, tool misuse, excessive agency, insecure retrieval, poisoning, and unsafe generated code.
• Guide the modernization of hybrid and legacy systems through modular architectures, APIs, events, observability, and practical transition plans.
• Turn architectural decisions and lessons learned into reference architectures, golden paths, validators, templates, runbooks, and platform capabilities.
• Advise senior leaders and build alignment across engineering, product, cybersecurity, data, legal, privacy, risk, procurement, and operations.
• Manage and develop an assigned team of architects through clear priorities, delegation, coaching, performance management, and succession plann

Tools

Google Cloud Vertex AI

Gemini

GKE

Cloud Run

BigQuery

Pub/Sub

Job description

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and drive secure, cloud-native, production-ready systems. This leadership-level role combines hands-on architecture with team development and cross-functional influence across technology, product, and security.

You will define target architectures, build reusable patterns, and oversee AI-native delivery, with Google Cloud services and strong emphasis on Zero-Trust, governance, and risk management.