Remote Enterprise AI Architect & Strategy Leader

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Family benefits

Vehicle discount program

Job summary

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and turn it into secure, cloud-native systems. This leadership role combines hands-on architecture with people management to deliver production-ready AI platforms on Google Cloud.

The role requires 12+ years in technology, 8+ years in architecture, deep cloud and security expertise, and the ability to translate business goals into practical roadmaps and governance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, cybersecurity, or related field.
• At least 12 years of technology experience, including eight years in architecture roles and responsible for enterprise decisions.

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 Vertex AI, Gemini, GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, 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 planning.
• Use enterprise‑approved AI tools responsibly to support eligible architecture research, synthesis, prototyping, and drafting while preserving confidentiality and human accountability.

Skills

AI architecture

Cloud architecture

Security architecture

Leadership

Enterprise strategy

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering/IS

Tools

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 turn it into secure, cloud-native systems. This leadership role combines hands-on architecture with people management to deliver production-ready AI platforms on Google Cloud.

The role requires 12+ years in technology, 8+ years in architecture, deep cloud and security expertise, and the ability to translate business goals into practical roadmaps and governance.