Senior AI Data Systems Engineer – State & Streaming

EY; Grand Rapids (MI); Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 177,000; Full time

Job summary

EY seeks an AI Systems Engineer to own the stateful backbone of EY’s AI-native platform, including data stores, memory tiers, and event streaming systems across cloud, on‑prem, edge, and air‑gapped environments.

Ideal candidate has deep experience with relational and vector/graph stores, streaming, CDC, and governance to ensure durable, consistent access to data in regulated client contexts.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 8+ years operating production data infrastructure, streaming systems, or database platforms at scale.
• Hands-on expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and caching (Redis/Valkey), including HA, replication, and backup/recovery.
• Exposure to AI/ML data patterns — embeddings, retrieval, feature/state stores for agentic workloads.
• Production experience with vector and/or graph databases (Qdrant, Milvus, PGVector, Neo4j) in AI/ML contexts.
• Deep experience with event streaming and messaging (Apache Kafka/Strimzi, NATS) and change data capture (Debezium).
• Experience with stream processing (Apache Flink) and event/schema governance (CloudEvents, schema registry).
• Experience running stateful systems on Kubernetes (operators, persistent volumes, object/block storage such as MinIO/OpenEBS).
• Ability to define clean ownership boundaries and data/schema contracts with platform, trust, runtime, and delivery teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the memory and data stores: relational and durable state (PostgreSQL, DBOS durable workflows), caching (Redis/Valkey), vector stores (Qdrant/Milvus/PGVector), knowledge graphs (Neo4j), and object/block storage (MinIO, OpenEBS Mayastor), across every environment and tenant.
• Own event streaming and async messaging: Apache Kafka (Strimzi), NATS JetStream (agent-to-agent), Debezium (change data capture), Apache Flink (stream processing), and Apicurio/CloudEvents (schema and event contracts).
• Own data durability, consistency, and recoverability: replication, backup/restore, point-in-time recovery, and cross-environment data movement, tiered by RPO/RTO.
• Build and operate streaming and CDC pipelines that move data reliably between stores and services, with schema governance and evolution that prevents breaking changes across producers and consumers.
• Make state multi-tenant and portable, ensuring isolation, performance, and consistent semantics whether running on managed cloud services or self-hosted OSS in an air‑gapped environment.
• Provide the data and lineage substrate that downstream governance, observability, and AI knowledge capabilities depend on, as well as integrating with lineage tooling.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Redis

Qdrant

Milvus

Neo4j

MinIO

Kafka

NATS

Debezium

Flink

CloudEvents

PGVector

Education

Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

Qdrant

Milvus

Neo4j

MinIO

Strimzi

Kafka

NATS

Debezium

Flink

CloudEvents

PGVector

Job description

EY seeks an AI Systems Engineer to own the stateful backbone of EY’s AI-native platform, including data stores, memory tiers, and event streaming systems across cloud, on‑prem, edge, and air‑gapped environments.

Ideal candidate has deep experience with relational and vector/graph stores, streaming, CDC, and governance to ensure durable, consistent access to data in regulated client contexts.