Senior AI Systems Engineer: Data & State Backbone

EY; Cincinnati (OH); Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 177,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Pension and 401(k)

Paid time off

Hybrid work model

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 across cloud, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments. You will ensure durable, high-performance access to data for agentic AI workloads and manage multi-tenant state across environments.

This role requires deep expertise in production data infrastructure, streaming architectures, and schema governance, with a focus on reliability and recoverability

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years operating production data infrastructure, streaming systems, or database platforms at scale.
• Hands-on experience 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/graph databases (Qdrant, Milvus, PGVector, Neo4j) in AI/ML contexts.
• Deep experience with event streaming and messaging (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 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 across environments (PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, vector/graph stores, MinIO/OpenEBS storage).
• Own event streaming and async messaging (Kafka/Strimzi, NATS JetStream, Debezium, Flink).
• Own data durability, consistency, and recoverability (backup/restore, PITR, cross-environment movement).
• Build and operate streaming and CDC pipelines with schema governance to prevent breaking changes.
• Make state multi-tenant and portable with isolation and performance guarantees across cloud and on-prem.
• Provide data and lineage substrate for governance, observability, and AI knowledge capabilities; integrate with lineage tooling.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Redis

Valkey

Vector stores

Neo4j

MinIO

OpenEBS

Kafka

NATS

Debezium

Flink

CloudEvents

Kubernetes

Temporal

Education

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

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

Qdrant

Milvus

PGVector

Neo4j

MinIO

OpenEBS

Apache Kafka

Strimzi

NATS JetStream

Debezium

Apache Flink

CloudEvents

Schema Registry

Kubernetes

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 across cloud, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments. You will ensure durable, high-performance access to data for agentic AI workloads and manage multi-tenant state across environments.

This role requires deep expertise in production data infrastructure, streaming architectures, and schema governance, with a focus on reliability and recoverability