Manager, Data Architecture

At Ford Motor Company, we believe freedom of movement drives human progress. We are shaping the future of mobility through connected vehicles, intelligent products, and data-driven decision-making - and data is foundational to that future.

Ford’s Global Data Insights & Analytics organization enables the enterprise to transform data into trusted, reusable, and actionable products. We partner with business, product, engineering, analytics, and AI teams to make Ford’s data easier to discover, understand, govern, and use at scale.

As a Cloud Data Architect, you will work across domains to translate business outcomes into scalable, secure, governed, and reusable data designs. You will establish architecture patterns and guardrails, guide teams through onboarding and implementation, and ensure data products are built with the quality, interoperability, semantic context, and operational rigor required for enterprise use.

• Define and evolve cloud data architecture patterns, standards, reference architectures, and roadmaps in partnership with Data Product Management, Enterprise Architecture, platform engineering, governance, security, and domain teams.
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to translate strategic business needs into scalable data architecture, data-product, and integration designs.
• Guide teams in designing and implementing trusted, reusable, discoverable, and well-governed data products.
• Develop and govern conceptual and logical data models for enterprise and domain data products.
• Establish standards for data modeling, naming, schema design, data contracts, lineage, metadata, master/reference data, data quality, and lifecycle management.
• Drive adoption of metadata-management and semantic capabilities, including the use of ontology-based business rules and semantic models where appropriate to support analytics and AI/agentic use cases.
• Partner with domain teams to understand their data landscape, assess architecture readiness, identify capability gaps, and define practical improvement plans.
• Serve as an architecture advisor and trusted point of contact for teams navigating the enterprise data ecosystem, helping connect them to the appropriate platform, product, governance, and enablement partners.
• Define and promote reusable architecture patterns that reduce duplicate data movement, improve interoperability, and enable self-service consumption.
• Ensure architecture designs meet requirements for security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, observability, data quality, and cost optimization.
• Review solution designs and provide architecture guidance throughout the delivery lifecycle, balancing enterprise standards with business speed and practical implementation needs.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve the usability and adoption of platform capabilities by identifying recurring customer friction, handoff gaps, and onboarding challenges.
• Evaluate emerging cloud, data, metadata, semantic, and AI technologies and recommend where they can create value for Ford.

• Communicate architecture decisions, tradeoffs, standards, and roadmaps clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Analytics, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 3+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, solution architecture, or a related technical role.
• Experience designing and delivering modern cloud-based data platforms, pipelines, or data products in GCP, AWS, Azure, or a comparable cloud environment.
• Strong experience with data modeling, including conceptual, logical, and physical models for operational, analytical, and event-driven use cases.
• Experience with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data; relational and NoSQL data stores; and data lake, lakehouse, warehouse, and data-mesh/data-product concepts.
• Strong SQL skills and experience using Python, Java, Scala, or similar languages for data processing, automation, and integration.
• Experience with distributed data-processing and streaming technologies, such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Flink, or comparable services.
• Experience with data governance, metadata management, data lineage, data quality, security, and privacy practices.
• Ability to influence across organizational boundaries and work effectively with product managers, engineers, data stewards, domain leaders, and executive stakeholders.
• Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex architecture concepts in clear business terms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform data services, including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Dataproc, Composer, Dataplex, Data Catalog, and related services.
• Experience designing event-driven and real-time data architectures.
• Experience defining data contracts, reusable data-product standards, and domain-oriented data architecture practices.
• Experience with semantic technologies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, or enterprise semantic models that enable trusted business rules and AI/agent use cases.
• Experience with data cataloging, metadata platforms, and data observability tools.
• Experience with DevSecOps, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automated testing, and architecture-as-code practices.
• Experience supporting AI, machine learning, generative AI, or agentic AI solutions through well-governed data and semantic foundations.
• Experience in a large, complex enterprise environment with diverse business domains, legacy systems, and modern cloud platforms.

• Automotive, manufacturing, mobility, financial, supply-chain, or connected-product data experience.

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've 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 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.

For more information on salary and benefits, click here: https://fordcareers.co/LL6

Visa sponsorship is 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.

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