Senior Data Scientist

We are the movers of the world and the makers of the future. We get up every day, roll up our sleeves and build a better world -- together. At Ford, we’re all a part of something bigger than ourselves. Are you ready to change the way the world moves?

As the Senior Data Scientist for Manufacturing AI & OT Data Strategy, you will play a multifaceted role combining strategic leadership and hands-on technical expertise. You will be responsible for overseeing the end-to-end lifecycle of data science projects, from initial problem definition and data acquisition to the deployment and continuous monitoring of models. You will serve as a key liaison between Manufacturing Operations, Engineering, and IT teams to translate complex industrial challenges—such as predictive maintenance, quality defect prediction, and process optimization—into scalable AI solutions.

AI Stack Development: Build features and services across the full AI stack: orchestration, retrieval/grounding, prompt/agent logic, evaluation/guardrails, serving, and observability.
 

End-to-End ML Pipelines: Build end-to-end ML pipelines from data collection and labeling through training, evaluation, and deployment across diverse factory environments.
 

Multi-modal Data Science: Work with diverse, heterogeneous datasets combining multiple modalities including images, multi-spectral sensor outputs, video, text, and tabular data to build scalable solutions.
 

Production Ownership: Take ownership of production models, ensuring robust monitoring, drift detection, and alerting systems for rapid issue resolution.
 

Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate with teams in production, process engineering, controls, and quality to translate ambiguous problem statements into actionable, end-to-end machine learning solutions.
 

Manufacturing Problem Solving: Partner with factory, quality and engineering teams to identify high-impact problems solvable through AI.

Education: BS/MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related quantitative field.

Overall Experience:

5+ years of progressive experience in Data Science, utilizing Machine Learning in production to solve complex business problems in a leading role.

3+ years of direct experience applying data science within a manufacturing or industrial environment (ideally automotive).

For Senior Level: Demonstrated ownership of services or platform components, end-to-end delivery of machine learning applications.

Technical Expertise:

Expert proficiency in Python (Numpy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow/PyTorch).

Strong SQL skills for complex data extraction, modeling and manipulation.

Proven ability to rapidly learn new concepts and apply machine learning methodologies to new and diverse domains.

Infrastructure & DevOps:

Proficiency with modern software delivery practices (version control, CI/CD, Terraform).

Familiarity with cloud platforms (GCP Preferred), cloud-native services, and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).

What Will Give You A Competitive Edge 

Hands-on experience with LLM application concepts (retrieval, grounding, agent design, function/tool use, evaluation, and MCP server).

Real-world experience deploying and maintaining production machine learning systems within an industrial or manufacturing set-up.

Deep experience with Operational Technology (OT) data infrastructure and industrial protocols (e.g., OPC UA, MQTT).

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