Senior AI Engineer

Ford Model e U.S.; Dearborn (MI); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Paid time off & holidays

Tuition assistance

Vehicle discount program

Job summary

Ford Motor Company is seeking a Senior AI Engineer for its Order Fulfillment Technology team. You will design, build, deploy, and operate production-grade AI solutions including retrieval-augmented generation, grounded recommendations, and human-overseen automation.

This hands-on role emphasizes scalable, secure AI systems. You will work with a cross-functional team to implement LLM agents, retrieval pipelines, and monitoring, ensuring responsible AI practices and measurable business value.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years in software/ML engineering or applied AI.
• Hands-on Python and SQL experience; building or deploying LLM/agent apps.
• Experience with production services, APIs, and CI/CD.
• Ability to evaluate AI/ML systems with metrics and human review.
• Strong collaboration with cross-functional teams.
• Excellent communication to translate business problems into technical solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade LLM applications and RAG solutions.
• Develop retrieval pipelines with ingestion, embeddings, and hybrid search.
• Create maintainable Python services and deploy with CI/CD and monitoring.
• Evaluate models with automated tests and monitoring for drift and costs.
• Support responsible AI governance throughout development.
• Collaborate with Product, Software Eng, Data Science, and Data Eng to ship AI solutions.
• Engage with end users to ground AI solutions in real workflows.
• Continuously explore AI technologies for measurable business value.

Skills

Python

SQL

LLM/Agent apps

LangChain

CI/CD

Containerization

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE/Data Science

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

AutoGen

Semantic Kernel

Job description

We made history and now we work to transform the future - for our customers, our communities and our families. You'll see your work on the road every day, helping people move freely and pursue their dreams. At Ford, you can build more than vehicles. Come build what matters.

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.

In this position...

The Order Fulfillment Technology team is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to design, build, deploy, and operate production-grade AI solutions supporting forecasting, planning, and scheduling. You'll build retrieval-augmented generation applications and controlled AI agents that generate grounded recommendations and automation with human oversight. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move AI solutions beyond prototypes into secure, scalable, and trustworthy production services.

What you'll do...

• AI Application Development: Design and build production-grade LLM applications, RAG solutions, and tool-using AI agents to improve decision speed, accuracy, and transparency.
• Retrieval Pipelines: Build retrieval pipelines covering ingestion, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, grounding, and citations, producing recommendations that are traceable and earn user trust.
• Engineering & Deployment: Develop maintainable Python services, APIs, and reusable AI components; deploy and operate them using automated testing, CI/CD, containerization, logging, and monitoring.
• Evaluation & Monitoring: Create evaluation datasets and automated tests measuring task success, groundedness, safety, latency, and cost; monitor production for drift, failures, and cost anomalies.
• Responsible AI & Governance: Apply responsible controls throughout the development lifecycle, exercising sound judgment on when generative AI is warranted versus a simpler, deterministic solution.
• Stakeholder Partnership: Partner with Product, Software Engineering, Data Science, and Data Engineering to bring AI solutions from concept to production.
• User Engagement: Spend time directly with planners, schedulers, and other end users to understand real workflows and pain points, ensuring AI solutions are grounded in how decisions are actually made.
• Continuous Improvement: Evaluate emerging AI technologies based on measurable business value, quality, and cost. Establish reusable patterns the wider team can build on.

You'll have...

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• Technical Experience: 5+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI, including hands-on Python, SQL, and experience building or deploying LLM/agent-based applications (e.g., prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG, or frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel).
• Software Engineering Practices: Experience developing maintainable production services/APIs, with working knowledge of automated testing, Git workflows, code reviews, CI/CD, and containerization.
• Evaluation Discipline: Experience defining measurable quality criteria and evaluating AI/ML systems using quantitative metrics and structured human review.
• Collaborative Delivery: Proven ability to work with software engineering teams and business users to move solutions from concept to production.
• User-Centered Practice: Demonstrated experience engaging directly with end users to shape and validate AI solutions.
• Communication: Proven ability to translate ambiguous business problems into technical solutions and interpret results for non-technical partners.

Even better, you may have...

• Advanced Degree: Master's degree or PhD in a quantitative or technical field.
• Technical Domain Expertise: LLM application architectures (RAG, tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, memory management) and retrieval pipeline design (embeddings, chunking, hybrid search, reranking).
• Agent Control & Orchestration: Structured outputs, workflow orchestration, agent state management, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Production Experience: Deploying and maintaining LLM/agent systems in production, including prompt versioning and CI/CD integration.
• AI Observability: Implementing logging, tracing, dashboards, and cost/latency monitoring for model or agent behavior.
• Security & Adversarial Testing: Testing for prompt injection, data leakage, unsafe tool execution, or unauthorized access.
• Cloud & Model Infrastructure: Deploying LLM/agent solutions in a cloud environment (GCP preferred), with familiarity with vector databases and model hosting.
• Industry Context: Familiarity with Automotive OEM data, dealer relationships, or supply chain logistics.

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice.

• 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.

This position is a salary grade 7 - salary grade 8 and ranges from $99,600-$192,900.

Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.

*Internal applicants: moving into this role may result in an adjustment to your current compensation based on the posted pay range for this role, taking into consideration your qualifications and other relevant factors.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.

This position is hybrid with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week.