Staff Data Platform and Products Architect

We are seeking a Staff Data Platform and Products Architect to serve as the technical anchor for our enterprise cloud data ecosystem. In this role, you will bridge the gap between business strategy and execution, designing secure, self-service data platform capabilities, real-time streaming architectures, and robust API contracts on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). By treating data as a product and championing developer experience (DevEx), you will empower engineering and AI teams to build, deploy, and consume production-ready data assets rapidly and securely. We made history and now we work to transform the future – for our customers, our communities and our families. You'll 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. Ford’s Electric Vehicles, Digital and Design (EVDD) team is charged with delivering the company’s 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. You’ll 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 infrastructure—including event-driven architectures, real-time streaming, API development, containerized microservices, schema-first governance, and automated GitOps/CI/CD—while 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. ### Responsibilities **What you'll 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 Reusabl…