Remote Principal AI Architect — Enterprise AI Strategy

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

Job summary

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and build secure, cloud-native, production-ready systems. This leader will manage AI, cloud, and security architects and own high-impact architecture work.

You will define target architectures, create reusable patterns, govern AI-native delivery, and ensure auditable controls with Zero Trust principles across Google Cloud services.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, cybersecurity, or a related field.
• 12+ years of progressive technology experience, including at least eight years in architecture roles and sustained responsibility for enterprise or cross‑domain decisions.
• Experience architecting and operating enterprise AI/ML systems in production, including generative AI, retrieval‑augmented generation, agentic workflows, evaluation, observability, and model lifecycle management.
• Deep cloud architecture experience on Google Cloud or a comparable hyperscaler and strong security architecture expertise spanning Zero Trust, identity, authorization, secrets, APIs, threat modeling, data protection, and software supply‑chain security.
• A strong understanding of AI safety and security risks is essential.
• The ability to communicate complex technical and investment trade‑offs to both 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 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, memory, 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 services like 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.

Skills

AI architecture

Cloud architecture

Leadership

Enterprise architecture

Security architecture

Stakeholder communication

People management

Google Cloud

Zero Trust

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Master’s degree (nice to have)

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 build secure, cloud-native, production-ready systems. This leader will manage AI, cloud, and security architects and own high-impact architecture work.

You will define target architectures, create reusable patterns, govern AI-native delivery, and ensure auditable controls with Zero Trust principles across Google Cloud services.