Senior Agentic AI Engineer: Build Safe Autonomous Agents

EY; St. Louis (MO); Remote; USD 144,000 - 374,000; Full time

Job summary

EY’s Challenger program seeks a senior software engineer focused on applied AI, distributed systems, and production-grade agents. You will shape execution loops, tools, context, and safety controls across long-running workflows.

This role blends enterprise integration work with challenging production failures, deciding when deterministic steps suffice and when autonomy adds value. You’ll build durable patterns and reusable capabilities with cross-functional teams.

Qualifications

• Production engineering: strong software engineering and distributed-systems judgment.
• Agent architecture: reason about planning, tools, state and coordination.
• AI application depth: model APIs, structured outputs, context and tool use.
• Evaluation discipline: measure complete trajectories and verified outcomes.
• Security and operability: least privilege, observability, recovery and intervention.
• Product judgment: balance quality, latency, cost, and user control.

Responsibilities

• Choose the right execution model and design agent architectures with measured complexity.
• Build dependable tools with clear contracts and safe recovery paths.
• Engineer agent behavior across planning, routing, delegation, and handoff.
• Create durable context combining instructions, memory, and environment feedback.
• Bound agent authority with scoped identities, budgets, and safety controls.
• Evaluate complete trajectories with tests for tool use and recovery.
• Operate long-running execution with durable state and safe retries.
• Make behavior observable with end-to-end traces and replay insights.
• Protect user control with clear intervention points and safe resumption.
• Build shared capability with cross-functional collaboration and reusable patterns.

Skills

Production engineering

Agent architecture

AI application depth

Evaluation discipline

Security & operability

Product judgment

Education

Bachelor’s Degree

Job description

EY’s Challenger program seeks a senior software engineer focused on applied AI, distributed systems, and production-grade agents. You will shape execution loops, tools, context, and safety controls across long-running workflows.

This role blends enterprise integration work with challenging production failures, deciding when deterministic steps suffice and when autonomy adds value. You’ll build durable patterns and reusable capabilities with cross-functional teams.