AI-Native Product Engineer - Senior

EY; Houston (TX); Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

401(k) plan

Flexible vacation policy

Paid time off

Job summary

EY’s Challenger program invites you to turn AI capabilities into durable products. You’ll be an end-to-end builder, close to users, product decisions, and production code, connecting the pieces that turn an AI demonstration into a durable product.

This role suits an engineer with founder-like ownership and the discipline to test assumptions early. You may move from conversations to prototypes, then to secure services within the same cycle.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field.
• End-to-end delivery: take software from concept through launch and adoption.
• Technical breadth across frontend, backend, API, data, and cloud.
• Applied AI: building products with LLMs, retrieval, or tools.
• Evaluation: automated testing and behavioral evaluation.
• Live-service ownership: telemetry, debugging, reliability, incident response.
• User-centered practice: work with users, designers, and product leaders.
• Engineering craft: clear specs, maintainable code, thoughtful trades.
• Travel up to 50% and hybrid office availability.

Responsibilities

• Start with the user; understand workflows with domain experts.
• Test assumptions quickly with prototypes and small releases.
• Own complete product slices across experience, services, data, and AI behavior.
• Shape AI behavior with instructions, context, retrieval, and tools.
• Build the evidence system with representative tasks and evaluations.
• Instrument user journeys to relate adoption to system behavior.
• Engineer for responsible use with clear permissions and data handling.
• Own production quality; release incrementally and monitor live behavior.
• Make practical trade-offs balancing experience, quality, speed, cost.
• Contribute reusable patterns and patterns with the broader platform.

Skills

5+ years exp

Experience in end-to-end delivery

Full-stack capability

Applied AI experience

Evaluation discipline

Live-service ownership

User-centered practice

Engineering craft

Travel and on-site up to 50%

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s Degree

Job description

Location: Anywhere in Country

At EY, we’re all in to shape your future with confidence.

We’ll help you succeed in a globally connected powerhouse of diverse teams and take your career wherever you want it to go. Join EY and help to build a better working world.

The opportunity

Turn emerging AI capabilities into products people choose to use, trust, and rely on. You will work as an end-to-end builder, close to users, product decisions, and production code, connecting the pieces that turn an AI demonstration into a durable product.

This role suits an engineer with founder-like ownership and the discipline to test assumptions early. You may move from a user conversation to a working prototype, from that prototype to a secure service, and from a production failure to a better evaluation in the same product cycle. Speed matters, but so do accessibility, maintainability, and the willingness to simplify when the evidence calls for it.

About Challenger

Challenger is a new EY program focused on building the firm’s next generation of services. It pursues opportunities where AI enables a fundamentally different service and way of delivering it, including rethinking existing offerings and developing new ones.

Small, dedicated teams build and test ideas in real conditions. Solutions that demonstrate clear business value and operational readiness transition to the business for adoption and scale.

Challenger Core develops and maintains the shared technology, methods, and risk and quality guardrails that support this work. Each team contributes reusable tools and practices, helping make the next service faster and less costly to build.

Your Key Responsibilities

• Start with the user. Work directly with users and domain experts to understand real workflows, observe friction, and identify where AI can create distinctive value.
• Test assumptions quickly. Turn product hypotheses into concise specifications, prototypes, and small releases that generate useful evidence early.
• Own complete product slices. Build coherent verticals across the experience, services, data, AI behavior, and enterprise integrations rather than optimizing a single layer.
• Shape AI behavior. Design instructions, context, retrieval, structured outputs, and tool use, choosing adaptation or tuning only when evidence supports it.
• Build the evidence system. Create representative tasks and automated evaluations that show whether the product is useful, correct, safe, accessible, and improving.
• Connect outcomes to behavior. Instrument user journeys so the team can relate adoption and task success to system behavior, latency, failures, and cost.
• Engineer for responsible use. Build clear permission boundaries, secure data handling, human checkpoints, graceful degradation, recovery, and rollback into the experience.
• Own production quality. Release incrementally, monitor live behavior, respond to incidents, and turn failures into durable product and engineering improvements.
• Make practical trade-offs. Balance experience, quality, speed, reliability, and cost, using deterministic software when it is the more dependable choice.
• Contribute reusable patterns. Share proven components and evaluation assets with the broader platform while remaining accountable for their performance in the product workflow.

Skills And Attributes For Success

• Full-stack engineering: Strong ability to build maintainable production software across modern interfaces, services, APIs, data, and integrations.
• AI application depth: Practical knowledge of model APIs, context design, retrieval, tool use, structured outputs, and agentic patterns.
• Product judgment: Ability to find the real user problem, frame clear hypotheses, and simplify the solution when evidence challenges the original idea.
• Evaluation discipline: Experience designing representative tests and experiments for systems whose behavior is not fully deterministic.
• Production ownership: Strong instincts for observability, accessibility, security, performance, reliability, recovery, and responsible use.
• High-agency collaboration: Comfort working across product, design, domain, platform, and control teams while staying accountable for the outcome after launch.

To qualify you must have

• 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field.
• End-to-end delivery: A record of taking customer- or employee-facing software from an unclear concept through launch, learning, and adoption.
• Technical breadth: Strong full-stack capability across modern frontend, backend, API, data, and cloud technologies, demonstrated through shipped work.
• Applied AI experience: Hands-on experience building products with large language models, retrieval, tools, or comparable AI application patterns.
• Evaluation experience: Evidence of automated testing and behavioral evaluation for systems with variable or probabilistic outputs.
• Live-service ownership: Demonstrated responsibility for telemetry, debugging, reliability, incident response, recovery, and performance improvement.
• User-centered practice: Experience working directly with users, designers, and product leaders to turn evidence into better product decisions.
• Engineering craft: A consistent record of clear specifications, maintainable code, thoughtful review, and sound technical trade-offs.
• Travel and On-site requirements: This role requires up to 50% travel and flexibility to go into the office in a hybrid capacity.

Ideally, you’ll also have

• Agentic products: Experience building workflow automation or collaborative AI products that interact with real business systems.
• Enterprise environments: Experience with identity, knowledge systems, permission-sensitive information, or regulated and confidential settings.
• Design sensibility: A strong instinct for clear interactions, accessibility, and reducing user effort in complex workflows.
• Efficiency at scale: Experience improving the quality, latency, reliability, or economics of production AI applications.
• Builder track record: Startup experience, open-source contributions, or another clear example of high-agency product building.

We welcome exceptional candidates from product, service design, operations, transformation, policy, domain, and entrepreneurial backgrounds; no particular degree or certification is required.

What We Offer You

At EY, we harness our collective strength to empower you to shape your future with confidence through professional growth, personal fulfillment and an inclusive culture. Learn more at ey.com/us/careers.

• We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package where you’ll be rewarded based on your performance and recognized for the value you bring to the business. The base salary range for this job is:
  • New York City, Boston, and Washington DC Metro Areas, Washington State, and Southern California offices – $128,400 to $192,500
  • Bay Area California offices – $133,600 to $200,600
  • All other offices locations in the US, including Sacramento – $106,900 to $176,500
• Individual salaries within these ranges are determined through a wide variety of factors including but not limited to education, experience, knowledge, skills and geography. In addition, our Total Rewards package includes medical and dental coverage, pension and 401(k) plans, and a wide range of paid time off options.
• Under our flexible vacation policy, you’ll decide how much vacation time you need based on your own personal circumstances. You’ll also be granted time off for designated EY Paid Holidays, Winter/Summer breaks, Personal/Family Care, and other leaves of absence when needed to support your physical, financial, and emotional well-being.

EY | Building a better working world

EY is building a better working world by creating new value for clients, people, society and the planet, while building trust in capital markets.

Enabled by data, AI and advanced technology, EY teams help clients shape the future with confidence and develop answers for the most pressing issues of today and tomorrow.

EY teams work across a full spectrum of services in assurance, consulting, tax, strategy and transactions. Fueled by sector insights, a globally connected, multi-disciplinary network and diverse ecosystem partners, EY teams can provide services in more than 150 countries and territories.

All in to shape the future with confidence.

EY provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, genetic information, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected basis, including arrest and conviction records, in accordance with applicable law.

EY is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities including veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and either need assistance applying online or need to request an accommodation during any part of the application process, please call 1-800-EY-HELP3, select Option 2 for candidate related inquiries, then select Option 1 for candidate queries and finally select Option 2 for candidates with an inquiry which will route you to EY’s Talent Shared Services Team (TSS) or email the TSS at [e-mail].