Battery Management System Architect

At Ford, 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.

Our advanced energy team is dedicated to powering the future through advanced electric vehicle battery systems and related electrified energy solutions. As we scale these initiatives, we are seeking technically strong engineers to help establish the foundation for our product execution and safety strategy.

In this position...

The Battery Management System (BMS) Architect owns the technical architecture, requirement set, and verification strategy for high-voltage BMS across Ford's advanced battery programs. The architecture is distributed across multiple BMS components and control levels, with defined interfaces to surrounding electrical, thermal, and safety systems. This role is the technical authority for how the battery management subsystem is partitioned, how its components communicate, and how it behaves in normal and fault conditions.

At Ford, 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. Our advanced energy team is dedicated to powering the future through advanced electric vehicle battery systems and related electrified energy solutions. As we scale these initiatives, we are seeking technically strong engineers to help establish the foundation for our product execution and safety strategy.

What you'll do...

• Architecture and Requirements

• Own the BMS architecture and the functional allocation, partitioning, and design rationale across its components and control levels.

• Own product attribute requirements - usable energy, power and current capability, charge and discharge rate, efficiency, and service life - and allocate them into system, subsystem, and component requirements.

• Decompose customer, safety, and program requirements with bidirectional traceability; author and release requirement sets across multiple concurrent programs and suppliers, maintaining a common core with program-specific variants.

• Define operating states and transitions, and the fault handling architecture covering detection, classification, propagation, annunciation, and recovery.

• Define the internal communication architecture, including message sets, timing budgets, and degraded-mode behavior.

• Define measurement and accuracy requirements for voltage, temperature, current, and isolation, and allocate error budgets across the sensing chain.

• Own architectural trade studies and document decisions, alternatives, and rationale.

• Verification Basis

• Own the design verification strategy and ensure full verification coverage of released requirements, with methods assigned by requirement class.

• Define acceptance criteria, test method, level of test, instrumentation, and evidence to be retained; allocate requirements to analysis, simulation, bench, subsystem, or full-system verification.

• Own requirement-to-verification-to-result traceability and its completeness at each program gate.

• Review and disposition verification results against acceptance criteria; approve deviations, retests, and resulting requirement changes.

• Define verification methods for supplier-executed testing and review returned evidence for method conformance and sufficiency.

• Interrogate test, bench, and field data to assess design performance and close issues to root cause.

• Interfaces, Safety, and Technical Leadership

• Author and maintain interface control documentation to thermal, power electronics, safety and protection, and higher-level control systems, including software-visible signals, diagnostic, and calibration interfaces.

• Own the functional safety concept to ISO 26262: hazard analysis and risk assessment, integrity level allocation, safety mechanism specification, diagnostic coverage targets, and the safety argument; support FMEA, FMEDA, and safe state definition.

• Author cybersecurity requirements in partnership with the owning cybersecurity organization, aligned to ISO/SAE 21434, and cascade them to suppliers.

• Define interface requirements to externally executed enclosure and packaging design, including board outline, connector position, thermal path, creepage and clearance, grounding, and sealing.

• Lead architecture and design reviews with internal teams and suppliers; adjudicate technical deviations and concessions.

• Provide technical direction to hardware, software, controls, and validation engineers, and act as escalation for cross-domain design conflicts.

• Present architecture status, technical risk, and recommendations to senior management

What you'll do...

• Architecture and Requirements

• Own the BMS architecture and the functional allocation, partitioning, and design rationale across its components and control levels.

• Own product attribute requirements - usable energy, power and current capability, charge and discharge rate, efficiency, and service life - and allocate them into system, subsystem, and component requirements.

• Decompose customer, safety, and program requirements with bidirectional traceability; author and release requirement sets across multiple concurrent programs and suppliers, maintaining a common core with program-specific variants.

• Define operating states and transitions, and the fault handling architecture covering detection, classification, propagation, annunciation, and recovery.

• Define the internal communication architecture, including message sets, timing budgets, and degraded-mode behavior.

• Define measurement and accuracy requirements for voltage, temperature, current, and isolation, and allocate error budgets across the sensing chain.

• Own architectural trade studies and document decisions, alternatives, and rationale.

• Verification Basis

• Own the design verification strategy and ensure full verification coverage of released requirements, with methods assigned by requirement class.

• Define acceptance criteria, test method, level of test, instrumentation, and evidence to be retained; allocate requirements to analysis, simulation, bench, subsystem, or full-system verification.

• Own requirement-to-verification-to-result traceability and its completeness at each program gate.

• Review and disposition verification results against acceptance criteria; approve deviations, retests, and resulting requirement changes.

• Define verification methods for supplier-executed testing and review returned evidence for method conformance and sufficiency.

• Interrogate test, bench, and field data to assess design performance and close issues to root cause.

• Interfaces, Safety, and Technical Leadership

• Author and maintain interface control documentation to thermal, power electronics, safety and protection, and higher-level control systems, including software-visible signals, diagnostic, and calibration interfaces.

• Own the functional safety concept to ISO 26262: hazard analysis and risk assessment, integrity level allocation, safety mechanism specification, diagnostic coverage targets, and the safety argument; support FMEA, FMEDA, and safe state definition.

• Author cybersecurity requirements in partnership with the owning cybersecurity organization, aligned to ISO/SAE 21434, and cascade them to suppliers.

• Define interface requirements to externally executed enclosure and packaging design, including board outline, connector position, thermal path, creepage and clearance, grounding, and sealing.

• Lead architecture and design reviews with internal teams and suppliers; adjudicate technical deviations and concessions.

• Provide technical direction to hardware, software, controls, and validation engineers, and act as escalation for cross-domain design conflicts.

• Present architecture status, technical risk, and recommendations to senior management