Senior Enterprise AI Architect & Strategy Lead

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Parental leave

Vehicle discount

Tuition assistance

Paid holidays

Paid time off

Back-up child care

Job summary

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and deliver secure, production-ready AI and cloud-native systems. This leadership role combines hands-on architecture with team development across AI, cloud, and security domains.

The successful candidate will drive standards, reference architectures, and roadmaps, aligning business needs with measurable delivery and risk management while guiding a global architecture team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, cybersecurity, or equivalent practical experience.
• 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.
• Deep cloud architecture experience on Google Cloud or a comparable hyperscaler and security expertise.
• Strong understanding of AI safety and security risks.
• Ability to create standards, reference architectures, roadmaps, and guardrails.
• Fluency in modern software delivery and production operations.
• Formal people-management experience.
• 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 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 testing, regression testing, adversarial testing, human review, user acceptance, and 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, and Pub/Sub.
• Embed Zero‑Trust principles, IAM, data protection, software supply‑chain security, and incident response into AI and cloud architectures.
• Address AI risks including prompt injection, data leakage, tool misuse, excessive agency, insecure retrieval, poisoning, and unsafe generated code.
• Guide modernization of hybrid and legacy systems through modular architectures, APIs, events, observability, and 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 architecture research, synthesis, prototyping, and drafting while preserving confidentiality and human accountability.

Skills

Enterprise AI

Cloud architecture

Security architecture

Executive communication

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering

Equivalent practical experience

Tools

Google Cloud

Vertex AI

GKE

BigQuery

Pub/Sub

Job description

Ford Credit is seeking a Principal AI Architect to shape its enterprise AI strategy and deliver secure, production-ready AI and cloud-native systems. This leadership role combines hands-on architecture with team development across AI, cloud, and security domains.

The successful candidate will drive standards, reference architectures, and roadmaps, aligning business needs with measurable delivery and risk management while guiding a global architecture team.