Staff Data Platform and Products Architect

We made history and now we work to transform the future for our customers our communities and our families. Youll 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.

Fords Electric Vehicles Digital and Design (EVDD) team is charged with delivering the companys vision of a fully electric transportation future. EVDD is customer-obsessed entrepreneurial and data-driven and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading customer experience for electric vehicle buyers and owners. Youll join an agile team of doers pioneering our EV future by working collaboratively staying focused on only what matters and delivering excellence day in and day out. Join us to make positive change by helping build a better world where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams.

In this role...

At Ford we are transforming our data ecosystem to operate with a modern Data paradigm treating data and platform capabilities as first-class secure and versioned products. As a Staff Data Platform and Products Architect you will design the foundation that empowers data engineers data scientists and application developers to easily ingest transform and securely consume high-quality data.

In this high-impact individual contributor role you will lead the transition toward a product-centric data architecture. You will be responsible for defining the technical roadmap and establishing the architectural guardrails for our next-generation cloud infrastructure. This role requires an architect who can navigate complex technical infrastructureincluding event-driven architectures real-time streaming API development containerized microservices schema-first governance and automated GitOps/CI/CDwhile championing developer experience (DevEx) and keeping platform decisions aligned with strategic business priorities. If you are passionate about building highly optimized developer platforms and driving technical excellence this is the role for you.

What youll do...

• Architect Scalable Platform Solutions: Design build and govern highly performant distributed data solutions on GCP leveraging BigQuery Dataproc Dataflow BigTable Cloud Storage Cloud Run Pub/Sub and Vertex AI to support global analytical operational and real-time streaming use cases.
• Lead Cloud Data Integration & Streaming: Design and implement high-volume event-driven streaming pipelines using GCP Pub/Sub Apache Beam and Apache Kafka. Build real-time stream processing systems to ingest and land high-volume events into optimized BigQuery analytical layers and low-latency BigTable operational stores.
• Design & Productize APIs: Architect and implement secure versioned and highly performant RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose platform services and data products to internal and external consumers. Define API contracts versioning strategies and authentication/authorization patterns (OAuth mTLS) to enable reliable self-service access.
• Enforce Schema-First Governance: Champion data contract standardizations and shift-left data quality practices. Define and enforce data schemas using Protobuf and centralized Schema Registries ensuring robust boundaries backward compatibility and semantic alignment across distributed producer and consumer teams.
• Build Reusable Platform Frameworks: Design opinionated extensible frameworks and libraries that abstract underlying infrastructure complexity. Enable product engineering teams to easily bootstrap and scaffold production-ready data pipelines and microservices through standardized templates configuration-driven workflows and automated code generation using Python and Jinja templating.
• Drive Platform and Data Strategy: Collaborate with business product and engineering leaders to translate organizational objectives into executable architectural roadmaps. Establish clear clean boundaries between core platform responsibilities and feature-team domain boundaries.
• Automate Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Lead the GitOps lifecycle by designing and maintaining Terraform (HCL) configurations and automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions Tekton) to ensure consistent secure and rapid infrastructure deployments across Dev QA and Production environments.
• Model and Transform Data: Design and govern modern data modeling patterns (such as dimensional modeling Data Vault and event-based streaming schemas) across analytical tables relational databases and flat-file stores. Orchestrate distributed Spark batch processing complex SQL transformations and ML training pipelines using Apache Airflow.
• Operate Containerized Services: Build publish and secure container images using Buildah and Docker managing deployments to Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Automate container image promotion environment progression and artifact registry security through dedicated CI/CD pipelines.
• Technical Leadership & Enablement: Provide hands-on mentorship and architectural guidance to data engineering teams. Establish best practices design patterns and style guides while building developer-enablement tooling that minimizes onboarding friction and accelerates time-to-market.

Youll Have...

• Education: Bachelors degree in Computer Science Data Engineering Information Technology or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Experience: 7 years of progressive technical experience in data architecture platform engineering or enterprise-scale data engineering.
• Cloud Architecture: 3 years of experience designing and operating end-to-end data platforms on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) AWS or Azure.
• Programming Proficiency: 3 years of practical application development experience using Python SQL and Java (or Go/Bash) tailored for high-performance pipeline development API creation and automation scripting.
• Platform Scaffolding: Experience building at least 1 centralized developer ecosystem or developer-facing templating framework using Git submodules or standardized repositories.
• Communication: Exceptional communication and presentation skills with a proven ability to explain complex technical and architectural concepts clearly to both technical engineers and business leaders.
• Location: Must live within reasonable commuting distance of Dearborn MI to support a hybrid work model.

Even Better youll have...

• Advanced Degrees & Certifications: Masters degree in Computer Science Data Science or equivalent; Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer or Professional Cloud Architect certifications.
• API Development: Experience designing building and deploying RESTful and gRPC APIs including schema definition authorization models and API gateway integrations.
• Data Modeling: Deep expertise in streaming and analytical data modeling (Star Schema Data Vault) across cloud-native databases (BigQuery BigTable PostgreSQL).
• Stream & Batch Processing: Proven experience building production streaming pipelines with Apache Beam/Dataflow and orchestrating distributed Spark/PySpark processing on Dataproc Serverless (including JVM tuning and performance optimization).
• Workplace Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Apache Airflow including writing robust DAG design patterns and managing multi-environment orchestrator instances.
• CI/CD & Containers: Strong experience with GitHub Actions (or Tekton) Terraform Docker/Buildah and running workloads on containerized orchestration platforms like Cloud Run or GKE.

You may not check every box or your experience may look a little different from what weve outlined but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company we encourage you to apply!

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 builderor 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 Years Day
Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

This position is leadership level 6 and ranges from $132800-$250800.
Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidates skills and experience and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope responsibility and competitive market value.

For more information on salary and benefits click here: 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 the United States if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability please call 1-.

This position is hybrid. Candidates will be required to be onsite four or more days per week.

#LI-Hybrid

#LI-CH2