Senior Staff Engineer - Connected Vehicle Data Platform

Job Description Role Overview: As a Staff Engineer at the Connected Vehicle Data Platform at Ford, you will play a crucial role in re-architecting the streaming foundation to efficiently process massive streams of vehicle data. Your responsibilities will include leading the technical vision for rebuilding the connected vehicle streaming infrastructure, mentoring and leading a team of Senior Engineers, defining data modeling standards, developing AI-driven data insights, and optimizing cloud unit economics. Your expertise will directly impact the efficiency, compliance, and safety of the 2026 MY+ vehicle fleet at Ford. Key Responsibilities: - Lead the technical vision and execution for re-building the connected vehicle streaming foundation, replacing legacy systems with modern, high-throughput, and low-latency stack designed for global scale and efficiency. - Act as the primary technical mentor and lead for the portfolios Staff and Senior Staff Engineers, driving technical alignment across an 80+ person engineering organization through RFCs, architecture reviews, and 'Golden Path' implementations. - Define the standards for database and time-series data modeling, architecting specialized schemas for high-cardinality vehicle telemetry that balance high-speed ingestion with cost-effective, performant querying. - Design and develop AI Agentic flows that revolutionize how Ford interacts with data, moving beyond static dashboards by building agents capable of autonomously 'answering data questions' interpreting natural language queries to generate real-time insights from billions of vehicle data points. - Architect systems where Applied AI/ML is used to drive massive efficiency gains, including intelligent data pruning, automated anomaly detection, and AI-optimized compute resource allocation (GCP Dataflow/Dataproc). - Develop autonomous agents for 'Intelligent Ingestion,' enabling self-healing pipelines and automated metadata tagging to eliminate data fragmentation and ensure global compliance. - Lead the technical strategy for optimizing cloud unit economics, driving architectural changes that significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for vehicle data products while increasing reliability. - Maintain a high level of technical craft by prototyping the most difficult segments of the architecture and solving the portfolios most complex technical bottlenecks. Qualifications Required: - Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field. Masters or PhD in a highly technical field preferred. - 10+ years of professional experience in software and data engineering, with a proven track record of architecting large-scale (Petabyte-scale) streaming and distributed systems. - Demonstrated experience as a Staff or Senior Staff Engineer (or equivalent) providing technical leadership for large organizations (50-100+ engineers). - Expert-level knowledge of Database Modeling (Relational, NoSQL) and specialized Time-Series Data Modeling. - Deep hands-on experience in Applied AI, including the development of Agentic workflows and utilizing LLMs to automate data exploration and insight generation. - Expert proficiency in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), specifically BigQuery, Dataflow, and Vertex AI. Mastery of Kafka or Pub/Sub for high-throughput messaging. - Proven ability to re-drive architectures specifically for efficiency gains, cost reduction, and performance optimization in a cloud-native environment. - Mastery of SDLC, MLOps, and LLMOps, with the ability to set the standard for testing, observability, and deployment of AI-integrated data systems. Role Overview: As a Staff Engineer at the Connected Vehicle Data Platform at Ford, you will play a crucial role in re-architecting the streaming foundation to efficiently process massive streams of vehicle data. Your responsibilities will include leading the technical vision for rebuilding the connected vehicle streaming infrastructure, mentoring and leading a team of Senior Engineers, defining data modeling standards, developing AI-driven data insights, and optimizing cloud unit economics. Your expertise will directly impact the efficiency, compliance, and safety of the 2026 MY+ vehicle fleet at Ford. Key Responsibilities: - Lead the technical vision and execution for re-building the connected vehicle streaming foundation, replacing legacy systems with modern, high-throughput, and low-latency stack designed for global scale and efficiency. - Act as the primary technical mentor and lead for the portfolios Staff and Senior Staff Engineers, driving technical alignment across an 80+ person engineering organization through RFCs, architecture reviews, and 'Golden Path' implementations. - Define the standards for database and time-series data modeling, architecting specialized schemas for high-cardinality vehicle telemetry that balance high-speed ingestion with cost-effective, performant querying. - Design and develop AI Agentic flows that revolution