Enterprise AI Architect & Strategy Lead

Lincoln Motor Company; Lansing (MI); On-site; USD 133,000 - 251,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Parental leave

Vehicle discount for employees and fam

Tuition assistance

Paid time off

Job summary

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and deliver secure, cloud-native systems. This leadership role manages AI, cloud, and security architects, defining roadmaps, standards, and implementation commitments across business and technology teams.

The role emphasizes an AI-native software delivery lifecycle, scalable AI applications on Google Cloud, strong security controls, and executive communication.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, cybersecurity, or a related field.
• Candidates should bring at least 12 years of progressive technology experience, including at least eight years in architecture roles.
• Experience architecting and operating enterprise AI/ML systems in production, including generative AI and agentic workflows.
• Strong cloud architecture experience on Google Cloud or a comparable hyperscaler with security expertise (Zero Trust, IAM, APIs).
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical and investment trade-offs to executives and engineers.

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 around specifications, bounded execution, automated validation, and learning loops.
• Architect production agentic systems integrating models, retrieval, tools, memory, orchestration, permissions, evaluation, observability, and recovery.
• Define risk-tiered autonomy, checkpoints, human oversight, and auditable decision trails for consequential actions.
• Establish evaluation practices spanning automated testing, adversarial testing, human review, and production outcome monitoring.
• Set patterns for enterprise knowledge provenance, freshness, retrieval, versioning, and memory.
• Design and govern scalable AI apps and platforms on Google Cloud (Vertex AI, Gemini, GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Pub/Sub).
• Embed Zero‑Trust, data protection, software supply‑chain security into AI and cloud architectures.
• Address AI-specific risks like prompt injection, data leakage, tool misuse, and unsafe code.
• Guide modernization of hybrid/legacy systems with modular architectures and APIs.
• Turn decisions into reference architectures, templates, runbooks, and platform capabilities.
• Advise senior leaders across engineering, cybersecurity, data, privacy, risk, and operations.
• Lead and develop a team of architects with clear priorities and coaching.

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, cybersecurity, or related field

Job description

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and deliver secure, cloud-native systems. This leadership role manages AI, cloud, and security architects, defining roadmaps, standards, and implementation commitments across business and technology teams.

The role emphasizes an AI-native software delivery lifecycle, scalable AI applications on Google Cloud, strong security controls, and executive communication.