Lead AI Agent Engineer – Systems & Safety

EY; Westlake Village (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

401(k) plan

Paid time off options

Flexible vacation policy

Job summary

EY in the United States is seeking a senior AI/Applied ML engineer to build agents that execute long-running workflows across enterprise integrations.

You will design deterministic loops, state and tools, ensure safety and observability, and collaborate with Challenger Core and product teams to deliver scalable solutions. This role emphasizes production readiness, robust testing, and delivering measurable business value while enabling secure and compliant automation.

Qualifications

• 7-9 years of software or applied ML engineering with ownership of production systems and live behavior.
• Hands-on evidence of shipping large-language-model applications, agents, or complex model-driven workflows used for real work.
• Strong capability in Python, TypeScript, or another language used for production services and integrations.
• Experience with model APIs, structured outputs, retrieval, tool use, and evaluation of variable behavior.
• Practical command of asynchronous work, state, concurrency, idempotency, retries, and failure recovery.
• Experience implementing access boundaries and scoped authority for applications or automated workloads.

Responsibilities

• Choose the right execution model and design agent architectures with deterministic steps and simple workflows when possible.
• Build dependable tools with clear contracts, validated outcomes, and secure error handling.
• Engineer agent behavior across planning, routing, delegation, stopping, retry, and handoff for complete workflows.
• Create durable context by combining instructions, user state, retrieval, memory, and environment feedback while preserving relevance and provenance.
• Bound agent authority with scoped identities, credentials, budgets, and approval points.
• Evaluate complete trajectories with tests for verified task success, tool use, recovery, human takeover, and prohibited actions.
• Operate long-running execution with durable state, checkpointing, safe retries, versioned releases, rollback, and graceful degradation.
• Make behavior observable with end-to-end traces and replay to diagnose patterns and drive improvements.
• Protect user control with clear intervention points to inspect, interrupt, redirect, and resume agent work.
• Build shared capability by collaborating across product, platform, knowledge, security, and evaluation teams.

Skills

Production engineering

Agent architecture

AI application depth

Evaluation discipline

Security and operability

Product judgment

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Job description

EY in the United States is seeking a senior AI/Applied ML engineer to build agents that execute long-running workflows across enterprise integrations.

You will design deterministic loops, state and tools, ensure safety and observability, and collaborate with Challenger Core and product teams to deliver scalable solutions. This role emphasizes production readiness, robust testing, and delivering measurable business value while enabling secure and compliant automation.