Forward Deployed Engineer – Advanced Manufacturing, Ford Energy
Ford Motor1 day ago
Dearborn, MI, USASenior
Base Salary
$115k - $193k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and deploy software connecting automated equipment, sensors, MES workflows, quality and warehouse systems, and cloud platforms.
- Design and operate IIoT architectures, MQTT messaging, OPC-UA connectivity, edge gateways, time-series data flows, and event-driven industrial systems.
- Embed with plant-floor teams to understand production constraints and deliver software that improves throughput, uptime, OEE, quality, scrap, traceability, cycle time, energy usage, and launch readiness.
- Build analytics, dashboards, alerts, models, workflows, and AI/ML-enabled automation for manufacturing operations.
- Own end-to-end delivery across application engineering, cloud infrastructure, edge deployment, integrations, automation, observability, and production support.
- Engineer secure manufacturing solutions addressing identity, access control, secrets, network boundaries, auditability, vulnerability management, uptime, safety, and data protection.
- Contribute to architecture and code reviews and establish scalable software, data, security, and deployment standards.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer, manufacturing systems engineer, industrial software engineer, solutions engineer, or similar hands-on engineering professional.
- Experience building production software, integrating systems, and working across application, cloud, edge, and data layers.
- Experience with manufacturing environments, automation systems, plant-floor data, MES integrations, industrial equipment, quality systems, maintenance workflows, or production operations.
- Hands-on familiarity with IIoT architectures, MQTT, OPC-UA, edge gateways, industrial protocols, event-driven architectures, time-series data, sensor ingestion, and secure plant-to-cloud connectivity.
- Ability to build or support manufacturing analytics involving OEE, throughput, downtime, cycle time, bottlenecks, quality, scrap, traceability, energy consumption, and asset performance.
- Experience with Go, Python, TypeScript, API design, OpenShift, GCP or comparable cloud platforms, containerized services, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, and secure production operations.
- Preferred experience with highly automated facilities, controls-adjacent systems, launch and ramp environments, identity and access management, secrets handling, vulnerability remediation, audit logging, network controls, secure deployment, data platforms, streaming architectures, and AI/ML-enabled automation.
- Ability to take ambiguous operational problems from initial discussion to working production software and operate autonomously in onsite manufacturing environments.
- Strong communication and relationship-building skills for collaboration across software, controls, operations, quality, maintenance, product, and business teams.
Benefits
- Immediate medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage.
- Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, and subsidized backup childcare.
- Family-building benefits including adoption and surrogacy reimbursement and fertility treatments.
- Employee and family vehicle discount programs and management leases.
- Tuition assistance, employee resource groups, paid community-service time, paid holidays, paid time off, and the option to purchase additional vacation time.
- Hybrid work arrangement requiring onsite presence four or more days per week.
- The role is initially employed by Ford and is expected to transition to the Ford Energy subsidiary within one year.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
About Ford Motor
Ford Motor Company designs, manufactures, and sells cars, trucks, SUVs, and commercial vehicles for consumers and businesses, and provides financing through Ford Credit. A public company headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan and listed on the NYSE, it operates globally under the Ford and Lincoln brands, including electric and connected vehicles such as the F‑150 Lightning and Mustang Mach‑E. Founded in 1903, it also offers software-driven fleet, mobility, and aftersales services.