Hands-On AI Solutions Architect Lead

EY; Chantilly (VA); Hybrid; USD 139,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Total Rewards package

Flexible vacation policy

Job summary

EY is seeking a hands‑on Solution Architect to design, prototype and build AI‑enabled applications and digital products. You will architect end‑to‑end solutions, prototype early, and guide engineering teams through complex decisions in managed services.

Expect deep dives into reference architectures, AI accelerators, and secure, scalable delivery. You will work directly in codebases, shaping patterns and ensuring production readiness with robust runbooks and CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related discipline (or equivalent experience).
• Typically 8+ years in engineering and solution architecture roles, with recent hands-on delivery responsibility.
• Prior consulting or complex product delivery experience strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design end‑to‑end application architectures across UI, APIs, services, data, AI components, integrations and runtime platforms.
• Actively prototype and spike solutions (code, configs, pipelines, prompts) to validate architectural decisions early.
• Define and evolve reference architectures for AI‑enabled products, including RAG patterns, vector search, prompt orchestration, evaluation and guardrails.
• Author Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), sequence flows, deployment diagrams and non‑functional requirements.
• Work directly in codebases alongside engineers to set patterns, unblock delivery and raise technical quality.
• Leverage AI coding and testing tools to accelerate development while enforcing clean architecture, security and maintainability.
• Review AI‑generated code, tests and documentation; apply engineering judgment to validate correctness and risk.
• Guide teams on effective prompt design, context management and reuse of AI accelerators.
• Define performance, scalability, resilience, observability and operability requirements up front.
• Design for reliability using SLOs/SLIs, telemetry, graceful degradation and incident readiness.
• Embed security‑by‑design, Zero Trust principles and Responsible AI controls into solution designs.
• Ensure solutions are production‑ready with runbooks, automation and clear support handoffs.
• Architect solutions that transition cleanly into long‑term managed operations.
• Design CI/CD pipelines, environment strategies and release automation with operational simplicity in mind.
• Balance speed of delivery with sustainability, cost transparency and service SLAs.
• Lead technical workshops and whiteboarding sessions with client architects and engineers.
• Explain architectural tradeoffs clearly to technical and semi‑technical stakeholders.
• Support solutioning and proposals primarily through architecture design, estimates and delivery approaches.

Skills

Hands-on coding

Cloud architecture

AI features

Security by design

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Eng

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

CI/CD

Observability

Job description

EY is seeking a hands‑on Solution Architect to design, prototype and build AI‑enabled applications and digital products. You will architect end‑to‑end solutions, prototype early, and guide engineering teams through complex decisions in managed services.

Expect deep dives into reference architectures, AI accelerators, and secure, scalable delivery. You will work directly in codebases, shaping patterns and ensuring production readiness with robust runbooks and CI/CD pipelines.