Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer

Ford-Motor-Company; Redford Charter Township (MI); On-site; USD 133,000 - 251,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Paid parental leave

Tuition assistance

Vehicle discount program

Job summary

Ford Motor Company is seeking a senior leader to architect and drive Ford's data mesh and data product ecosystem. You will guide federated governance, data modeling, and platform tooling to enable scalable, AI-ready data platforms across manufacturing and enterprise domains.

The role emphasizes leadership, cloud-native modernization, and collaboration with product, analytics, and IT teams to deliver trusted data products and measurable business impact.

Qualifications

• Master's level education or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve Ford's data mesh architecture across domains and define data product contracts.
• Establish federated governance policies and SLAs across decentralized teams.
• Lead modernization of data workflows using cloud-native patterns (GCP, Vertex AI).
• Lead ingestion, transformation, and publication pipelines for data assets.
• Design semantic layers and knowledge graphs for AI agents.

Skills

Data architecture

GCP BigQuery

Python

SQL

Data modeling

Data governance

Stakeholder management

Education

Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field

15+ years in data architecture/engineering or advanced database design

Tools

BigQuery

Cloud Storage

Dataform

Data Fusion

Astronomer or equivalent tools

Job description

Data Mesh Strategy & Architecture

• Design and evolve Ford's data mesh architecture across manufacturing and enterprise domains — defining domain boundaries, data product contracts, and interoperability standards.
• Establish and maintain federated computational governance policies (schema standards, data quality SLAs, security classifications, lineage and retention requirements) applied consistently across decentralized domain teams.
• Champion adoption of next-generation technologies and cloud-native patterns (GCP, Vertex AI, agentic AI/LLM orchestration) to modernize legacy data workflows and drive measurable business impact.

Data Product Development

• Lead the transformation of raw data landing in cloud platforms from Manufacturing systems, into curated, documented, high-quality data products.
• Define and enforce data product standards: ownership, schema versioning, SLAs for freshness/completeness/accuracy, discoverability, and access controls.
• Oversee the build-out of ingestion, transformation, and publishing pipelines (batch and streaming) that convert raw operational data into standardized, reusable data assets.
• Design and build data structures and semantic layers (ontologies, knowledge graphs) that enable AI agents to interpret enterprise data consistently and with minimal human intervention.

Data Modeling & Architecture

• Design and develop data models (enterprise, conceptual, logical, and physical) for assigned domains; manage and maintain models in a shared repository.
• Partner with product and analytics teams to translate use cases into data requirements, providing architecture guidance, data models, and design reviews.
• Establish and enforce data architecture principles, standards, and best practices across the team's data products (catalog, lineage, observability, security, interoperability).
• Drive data quality initiatives: profile source-system data, define data quality requirements and metrics, and guide monitoring, measurement, reporting, and remediation.

Platform & Tooling

• Drive adoption of cloud services like GCP as the technical backbone of the data mesh and data product ecosystem.
• Evaluate and implement metadata management and data catalog solutions to support discoverability and trust across the mesh.
• Establish monitoring, observability, and SLA-tracking for published data products.

Governance & Compliance

• Own and evolve the federated governance framework, balancing global standards with domain-level autonomy, ensuring compliance with Ford's data security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
• Implement automated policy enforcement (schema validation, access control, metadata cataloging, lineage tracking) via GCP-native and third-party tooling.
• Partner with cybersecurity, legal, and compliance teams to classify and protect sensitive manufacturing and enterprise data.
• Ensure development patterns support Ford's data security requirements and global privacy regulations (privacy and compliance by design).

• Master’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
• 5+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or advanced database design/modeling, including designing or implementing databases, data warehouses, or data marts — with exposure to large-scale manufacturing or industrial data environments.
• 15+ years of experience leading, managing, or mentoring technical teams (direct people leadership, matrixed leadership, or lead/owner roles directing cross-functional teams).
• Hands‑on experience creating data models using data modeling tools.
• Deep, hands‑on experience with GCP technologies including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataform, Data Fusion, Astronomer, or similar cloud data engineering tools.
• Demonstrated experience designing or implementing data mesh or domain‑oriented data architectures.
• Understanding of AI/ML capabilities, with experience modeling semantic layers, knowledge graphs, or ontologies for a data platform.
• Knowledge of data governance, data quality, and data product marketplace enablement practices.
• Proficiency in SQL, Python, and modern data pipeline/orchestration tools.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across plant floor operations teams and enterprise IT/analytics functions.

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• 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 leadership level 6 and ranges from $132,800-$250,800.

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.

Visa sponsorship is NOT available for this position.

Relocation assistance is NOT provided for this role.

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.