Senior AI Platform Architect & Cloud Strategy Lead

EY; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 144,000 - 329,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Pension and 401(k)

Paid time off

Job summary

EY is seeking a senior platform architect to shape and operate a scalable AI platform across cloud and hybrid environments. You will own the platform vision, drive a product mindset, and enable portable model access while balancing performance, resilience, and cost.

This high-impact role requires strong cloud/SRE experience, 50% travel, and collaboration with Challenger Core teams. Join a Challengers program to test ideas in real conditions and deliver measurable business value.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
• 9–12+ years of relevant experience.
• Substantial experience designing and operating cloud, infrastructure, SRE, or platform capabilities, including responsibility for production AI workloads.
• A record of building a shared platform adopted by multiple product teams, with measurable improvement in speed, reliability, or cost.
• Deep experience in at least one major cloud and strong judgment about portable patterns for hybrid or multi-cloud constraints.
• Practical depth in orchestration, networking, identity, infrastructure as code, delivery automation, APIs, and production observability.
• Experience operating model-serving and AI lifecycle capabilities, including release controls, evaluation, capacity, service objectives, and incident learning.
• Demonstrated ability to make build-versus-buy decisions and explain the operational, commercial, and technical consequences.
• Experience leading complex programs, influencing senior stakeholders, and raising engineering capability through mentoring.
• This role requires up to 50% travel and flexibility to go into the office in a hybrid capacity.

Responsibilities

• Set the platform direction. Own the AI platform vision, reference architecture, roadmap, and non-functional standards across cloud, hybrid, and approved edge environments.
• Run the platform as a product. Understand developer needs, define clear service tiers and golden paths, prioritize the roadmap, and measure adoption and time to value.
• Enable portable model access. Design gateways and stable contracts that support model choice, policy-aware routing, resilience, and controlled experimentation without hiding important trade-offs.
• Architect elastic foundations. Shape the compute, storage, and network capabilities needed for AI workloads, balancing performance, regional constraints, resilience, and cost.
• Automate the path to production. Create repeatable delivery patterns that promote code and AI assets together, with progressive release, rollback, and evidence built into the process.
• Define trusted agent runtimes. Establish secure execution patterns for tools, identities, approvals, isolation, recovery, and replay so agent behavior remains controlled and understandable.
• Engineer for reliability. Set service objectives, observability standards, recovery patterns, and resilience exercises that make platform health measurable and operationally useful.
• Make economics visible. Connect usage, performance, and quality signals so teams can improve unit economics without weakening reliability or user outcomes.
• Guide strategic choices. Lead build-versus-buy and portability decisions with engineering, product, security, risk, procurement, and finance partners.
• Build capability. Mentor platform engineers and SREs, strengthen architecture practices, and help teams turn emerging technology into reusable production patterns.

Skills

Systems architecture

AI platform depth

Platform product mindset

Operational excellence

Trust by design

Influential leadership

Travel flexibility

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field

Job description

EY is seeking a senior platform architect to shape and operate a scalable AI platform across cloud and hybrid environments. You will own the platform vision, drive a product mindset, and enable portable model access while balancing performance, resilience, and cost.

This high-impact role requires strong cloud/SRE experience, 50% travel, and collaboration with Challenger Core teams. Join a Challengers program to test ideas in real conditions and deliver measurable business value.