Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer to join our team at Ford Motor Company. As a Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer, you will play a critical role in designing and evolving Ford's data mesh architecture across manufacturing and enterprise domains.

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 applied consistently across decentralized domain teams.
• Champion adoption of next-generation technologies and cloud-native patterns to modernize legacy data workflows and drive measurable business impact.

Data Product Development

• Lead the transformation of raw data 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 that convert raw operational data into standardized, reusable data assets.
• Design and build data structures and semantic layers that enable AI agents to interpret enterprise data consistently and with minimal human intervention.

Data Modeling & Architecture

• Design and develop data models 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.
• 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 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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 15+ years of experience leading, managing, or mentoring technical 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.