Forward Deployed Engineer - Applied AI - Senior Manager - Financial Services - Consulting

EY; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

EY is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer – Applied AI at Senior Manager level in the Financial Services sector. You will define AI system design principles, reference architectures, and engineering standards, while leading complex initiatives across multiple teams to deliver scalable AI-enabled solutions.

You will mentor senior engineers, shape platform strategy, and drive governance and operational excellence for enterprise AI programs using tools like Claude Code, Codex, and other agentic

Qualifications

• Translate complex enterprise business challenges into strategic AI architecture decisions.
• Demonstrated experience architecting enterprise-scale knowledge AI systems and agentic design.
• Strong hands-on engineering credibility in Python and modern AI tooling.

Responsibilities

• Define and govern AI system design principles, reference architectures, and engineering patterns for AI/ML, generative AI, and agentic systems.
• Lead complex technical challenges across teams, providing hands-on guidance in architecture and implementation.
• Own end-to-end architecture for strategic AI initiatives, including service boundaries, data contracts, and evaluation frameworks.

Skills

AI architecture

Python

Enterprise AI

LLM Ops

API strategy

Security & compliance

Multi-agent systems

Kubernetes

LangChain

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure OpenAI

AWS Bedrock

Vertex AI

Job description

Location: Charlotte, Dallas, New York, Tampa

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.

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.

Forward Deployed Engineer – Applied AI - Senior Manager - Financial Services

EY is the only professional services firm with a separate business unit (“FSO”) that is dedicated to the financial services marketplace. Our FSO teams have been at the forefront of every event that has reshaped and redefined the financial services industry. If you have a passion for rallying together to solve the most complex challenges in the financial services industry, come join our dynamic FSO team! The business problems our clients are facing today are not the same problems they have faced in the past. The rapid pace of development in Artificial Intelligence and the technology that enables it has created an urgent need to innovate and adapt to the new global business paradigm. Financial institutions are looking to build smarter and more efficient ways to operate their business, create new revenue streams, and better manage risk, through new opportunities uncovered by their data. We believe that to fully unlock the potential of Artificial Intelligence, we need to look not only at its application, but also at the strategy level for how best to transform the enterprise into one that is technology and data focused and ready for the new age. Our clients’ problems are becoming increasingly complex while at the same time the need to automate and streamline is rising.

The Opportunity:

Leads the definition and delivery of AI system design principles, reference architectures, and engineering standards for highly complex AI/ML initiatives across the organization. Brings deep technical authority, exceptional hands‑on engineering experience, and the ability to shape long‑term technology direction while also leading complex project and program outcomes. Takes accountability for the architecture, technical quality, integration approach, delivery execution, and operational excellence of AI‑enabled solutions and platforms. Ensures business and user requirements are translated into scalable, secure, reusable, and high‑impact technical designs that can be adopted across multiple teams and domains.

Your Key Responsibilities:

• Define and govern system design principles, reference architectures, and engineering patterns for AI/ML, generative AI, RAG, and agentic systems.
• Lead the most complex and escalated technical challenges across multiple teams, providing hands‑on guidance in architecture, coding, troubleshooting, and design remediation.
• Own end‑to‑end architecture for strategic AI initiatives, including service boundaries, orchestration models, data contracts, evaluation frameworks, and operational guardrails.
• Drive consistency in engineering standards, design reviews, architecture governance, observability, resilience, security, and responsible AI practices.
• Shape the enterprise integration model for AI/ML components within broader product, platform, infrastructure, and client delivery ecosystems.
• Define and evolve API and integration strategies for AI platforms and applications, including contract design, versioning, security, idempotency, and reliability patterns at enterprise scale.
• Ensure API layers and application integration patterns decouple clients from internal AI service topology, enabling safe evolution of models, workflows, and data stores without breaking consumers.
• Lead large, complex project or program delivery outcomes by aligning architecture decisions, engineering execution, stakeholder governance, risks, dependencies, and delivery quality.
• Influence platform strategy, technical roadmaps, and investment decisions through deep engineering judgment and practical delivery insight.
• Partner with senior leaders across Engineering, Architecture, Product, Data, Security, Operations, and engagement leadership to align strategy with execution.
• Establish scalable approaches for model evaluation, benchmarking, experimentation, rollout controls, and production quality measurement.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, raising the organization’s bar for system design, technical depth, delivery rigor, and architectural decision‑making.
• Use modern AI‑assisted software engineering tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent agentic coding platforms to accelerate engineering design, implementation, and review practices.
• Identify opportunities to reduce duplication, accelerate delivery, and create reusable AI platform capabilities across the enterprise.

AI and Engineering Skills:

Gen AI Foundational:

• Ability to translate complex enterprise business challenges into strategic AI architecture decisions, balancing immediate delivery needs with long‑term platform scalability and firmwide adoption
• Deep knowledge of foundation model landscape including open‑source and commercial models, with the ability to evaluate, select, and advise on model suitability, capability trade‑offs, and total cost of ownership across diverse enterprise use cases (e.g. GPT‑4o, Claude, Llama, Gemini, Mistral etc.)
• Demonstrated experience architecting and overseeing enterprise‑scale knowledge AI systems spanning foundation model management, agentic design, AI application integration, and NLP and multimodal systems (e.g. Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Hugging Face etc.)
• Advanced hands‑on engineering credibility in Python, with the ability to guide architecture and implementation decisions across senior engineering teams
• Experience serving as a subject matter authority on knowledge AI systems and their application to both client‑facing opportunities and internal horizontal platform development

Agentic and LLM Ops:

• Expertise in designing and governing enterprise agentic AI frameworks including multi‑agent orchestration, tool use patterns, and memory architecture across complex, large‑scale deployments (e.g. LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, NVIDIA NIM, CrewAI etc.)
• Ability to define and enforce LLM Ops standards across the enterprise including model lifecycle governance, deployment pipelines, versioning strategies, and continuous improvement frameworks (e.g. MLflow, Azure ML, Kubeflow, GitHub Actions, LangChain, LlamaIndex etc.)
• Experience integrating external vendor tooling for model monitoring, observability, safety, and compliance into enterprise AI platforms (e.g. LangSmith, Arize, Datadog, Azure Monitor etc.)
• Ability to advise clients and internal stakeholders on multi‑year AI architecture strategy, including platform investment decisions, build‑vs‑operate trade‑offs, and sequencing of AI capability development across the enterprise
• Ability to identify opportunities to reduce duplication, accelerate delivery, and create reusable AI platform capabilities and reference architectures that can be adopted across multiple teams and client engagements
• Experience defining enterprise‑wide evaluation and observability standards covering output quality, behavioral drift, safety, and auditability across agentic and LLM systems (e.g. RAGAS, DeepEval, Arize, Weights & Biases etc.)

Software Engineering:

• Ability to define and govern API strategy, containerization, and integration standards for enterprise AI platforms including contract design, versioning, security, idempotency, and reliability patterns — ensuring AI service consumers are decoupled from internal model and workflow topology (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, REST, gRPC, Azure API Management, AWS API Gateway etc.)
• Proven track record of building and delivering large‑scale enterprise AI platforms, balancing hands‑on technical contribution with cross‑functional coordination and stakeholder alignment
• Experience governing data security, privacy, and compliance practices as they apply to enterprise LLM and agentic system development and deployment (e.g. Azure Purview, AWS Macie, Microsoft Presidio etc.)
• Strong ability to communicate complex AI architecture concepts to executive, technical, and non‑technical audiences and translate strategic direction into actionable engineering roadmaps

Soft Skills and additional attributes for success:

• Clear communicator able to explain complex AI system behavior and trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical stakeholders, including risk and compliance.
• Strong ownership and accountability, taking responsibility for AI systems from design through production and issue resolution.
• Comfort with ambiguity, able to operate effectively as requirements, regulations, and technologies evolve.
• Collaborative and cross‑functional, working closely with engineering, product, risk, legal, and audit teams.
• Sound judgment in regulated environments, with awareness of risk, controls, and when human oversight is required.
• Bachelor’s degree preferred.
• 10+ years of applied engineering experience, including extensive experience in senior AI/ML engineering, architecture, or complex technology delivery roles.

Demonstrated experience in the following areas will be a huge plus:

• Demonstrated experience advising clients on enterprise AI platform strategy including build‑vs‑operate trade‑offs, vendor evaluation, and integration of foundational model and agentic tooling into existing technology ecosystems (e.g. Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, NVIDIAAI Enterprise, Hugging Face etc.)
• Demonstrated ability to translate governance and compliance requirements into scalable technical architectures that enable responsible AI adoption at scale
• Ability to maintain current knowledge of emerging AI techniques, model architectures, and agentic patterns and assess their readiness and applicability for enterprise adoption
• Ability to collaborate across business, technology, and product domains to align AI initiatives with enterprise architecture standards and strategic objectives
• Familiarity with safety and alignment techniques for large language models including output filtering, guardrail design, and responsible AI governance frameworks (e.g. NeMo Guardrails, Guardrails AI, Azure Content Safety, LLM Guard etc.)
• Familiarity with multimodal and vision‑language model architectures and their applicability to enterprise knowledge AI use cases (e.g. GPT‑4o, Gemini, LLaVA etc.)
• Familiarity with small language model design patterns and their role in cost‑effective, latency‑sensitive enterprise deployments (e.g. Phi, Mistral, Llama 3, Gemma etc.)
• Familiarity with AI regulatory and risk management frameworks relevant to financial services including model risk governance and explainability obligations (e.g. SR 11‑7, FINRA, REG BI)
• Familiarity with enterprise data architecture patterns that underpin large‑scale AI systems including data mesh, datalake