Senior AI Platform Engineering Lead

EY; Buffalo (NY); Remote; USD 144,000 - 329,000; Full time

Job summary

EY seeks a senior leader for its AI Platform Engineering group to shape the foundational substrate powering EY’s AI-native platform. You will set direction for a team of AI Infrastructure and AI Systems Engineers and own the delivery roadmap across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments.

This player-coach role combines hands-on design with leadership, emphasizing reliability, portability, and security in regulated client contexts, accelerating downstream AI workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 10+ years building or operating enterprise infrastructure, cloud platforms, or large-scale Kubernetes environments, including deep, current hands-on systems depth.
• 3+ years leading or directing engineering teams (technical leadership of multiple engineers), while remaining an active hands-on contributor.
• Track record of owning a platform or infrastructure roadmap and architecture end to end, from requirements and estimation through phased delivery and steady-state operations.
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes distributions (RKE2, EKS/AKS/GKE, K3s) and full cluster lifecycle management at production scale.
• Deep experience with bare-metal, cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and ideally air-gapped deployment models.
• Strong grounding in cluster networking (Cilium/service mesh/CNI), storage, and multi-tenancy isolation.
• Hands‑on experience with GPU infrastructure and scheduling (NVAIE/DCGM, GPU operators, virtualization/MIG) and AI inference serving (e.g., vLLM, NIM, Triton, Ray Serve).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and GitOps tooling (Terraform/OpenTofu, Helm, ArgoCD, Crossplane).
• Experience with disaster recovery, backup, and cross-environment replication tiered by RPO/RTO.
• Proven track record operating production infrastructure under compliance, security, or regulatory constraints, including incident leadership and SLO ownership.
• Experience managing infrastructure budgets, capacity plans, and vendor relationships.
• Ability to work effectively with security, architecture, product, and delivery teams, and to represent and defend technical decisions to senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the AI Platform Infrastructure Engineering team: direct the day-to-day and longer-term work of AI Infrastructure and AI Systems Engineers, set priorities, allocate work, and remove blockers so the team delivers predictably; hire, mentor, and coach engineers, set engineering standards (design reviews, code reviews, runbooks), and grow technical depth and leadership capability across the team.
• Build hands-on as a senior individual contributor: personally design, implement, and debug the hardest and highest-risk components of the platform — cluster bring-up, GPU and networking enablement, multi-tenancy, inference and routing — and lead by example on engineering quality.
• Own the infrastructure delivery roadmap: sequence the build into phases that each put a usable capability into engineering teams’ hands, define and defend entry and exit gates, and report progress, risk, and trade-offs to senior leadership.
• Own the infrastructure foundation and cloud-native platform: from Ubuntu/OS, BMC/bare-metal, DPU architecture, and NVAIE (GPU/Network/DCGM) through compute, Kubernetes and scheduling, cluster fabric and networking, multi-tenancy, and distributed compute — delivering foundational capabilities (Infrastructure Management, Kubernetes & Scheduling, Cluster Fabric Management) as a provisioned, patched, production-ready substrate for Agentic AI workflows and downstream runtime, data, and execution services.
• Stand up and operate EY Agentic AI environments: across cloud (EKS/AKS/GKE), on-prem AI Factory (RKE2/NVAIE), edge (K3s), client-managed, and air-gapped deployment modes, maintaining one consistent stack contract across all targets and keeping the substrate modular and swappable so components can be replaced without rewriting consumers or creating vendor lock-in.
• Own secure execution, inference, and routing: Ray Serve, vLLM/NIM/Triton, and NVIDIA Dynamo, with sandboxed execution (NVIDIA OpenShell) for isolated, safe model execution; and Envoy AI Gateway, semantic routing (vLLM-SR), model and prompt selection, and streaming response handling — directing each request to the right model under the right constraints.
• Own operational excellence, resilience, and platform delivery: define SLOs, on-call and incident management practices, and lead post-incident reviews; own backup, disaster recovery, and cross-environment replication for high availability (Velero, CloudNativePG, Cilium ClusterMesh), patching, security hardening, and supply-chain hygiene; and partner with DevOps Engineers on CI/CD/CV (ArgoCD) and infrastructure-as-code / GitOps (Helm/OpenTofu) so environments are reproducible and drift-free.
• Own GPU capacity, platform economics, and vendor selection: forecast demand, set quotas and cost attribution, and manage the infrastructure budget; evaluate commercial against open-source options, run proofs of concept, manage strategic vendor relationships, and work with procurement on long-lead hardware and licensing, making the commercial case for capacity to senior leadership.

Skills

Cloud-native platform engineering

Kubernetes at scale

GPU infrastructure

Technical leadership

Incident management

Education

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

Tools

RKE2

EKS/AKS/GKE

K3s

Terraform/OpenTofu

Helm

Job description

EY seeks a senior leader for its AI Platform Engineering group to shape the foundational substrate powering EY’s AI-native platform. You will set direction for a team of AI Infrastructure and AI Systems Engineers and own the delivery roadmap across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments.

This player-coach role combines hands-on design with leadership, emphasizing reliability, portability, and security in regulated client contexts, accelerating downstream AI workflows.