AI Systems Engineer - Data & State Management - Senior
EY · Des Moines, United States · 1mo ago
Location: Anywhere in Country
At EY, we’re all in to shape your future with confidence.
We’ll help you succeed in a globally connected powerhouse of diverse teams and take your career wherever you want it to go. Join EY and help to build a better working world.
The opportunity
We are seeking an AI Systems Engineer to own the stateful backbone of EY’s AI-native platform, including the data stores, memory tiers, and event streaming systems that hold and move every piece of state in EY’s Hybrid AI Multi-Environment Runtime (HAI). This role ensures that agentic AI workloads have durable, performant, and consistent access to data across cloud, on-prem, edge, client-managed, and air-gapped environments.
Within HAI, this is a distinct discipline from platform operations and model serving. This role owns everything that must remember, persist, or flow: relational and key-value state, vector and graph stores, object storage, durable workflows, and the streaming and change-data-capture pipelines that connect them. It is the layer that makes the platform stateful, reliable, and event-driven.
It is ideal for a data-infrastructure engineer who is equally comfortable operating production databases and high-throughput streaming systems, who treats data durability, consistency, and recoverability as non-negotiable in regulated client contexts, and who understands that state is the hardest part of any distributed platform to get right.
Your key 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 and attributes for success
- Deep expertise operating production databases and data stores at scale, including relational, key-value, vector, graph, and object storage.
- Strong command of streaming and event-driven architectures (Kafka, NATS, CDC, stream processing) and the consistency tradeoffs they involve.
- A durability-first mindset: thinking in terms of consistency, recoverability, blast radius, and data correctness under failure.
- Ability to operate stateful systems consistently across managed cloud and self-hosted OSS in cloud, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments.
- Strong grasp of schema governance and evolution, preventing breaking changes across producers and consumers.
- Strong communicator able to guide consuming teams toward the right storage and streaming patterns.
- Orientation toward reliability and toil reduction through automation and infrastructure-as-code for data systems.
To qualify you must have
- 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.
Ideally, you’ll also have
- Experience with durable workflow engines (DBOS, Temporal, or equivalents).
- Experience with data lineage and metadata tooling (OpenLineage, Marquez, or equivalents).
- Proven track record operating data systems under compliance, security, or regulatory constraints, including data-at-rest and in-transit protection.
- Familiarity with multi-tenant data isolation and per-tenant performance management.
- Experience with cross-environment replication and DR strategies tiered by RPO/RTO (e.g., MirrorMaker, CloudNativePG PITR).
- Exposure to regulated delivery environments (financial services, tax, healthcare, risk).
What we offer you
At EY, we’ll develop you with future-focused skills and equip you with world-class experiences. We’ll empower you in a flexible environment, and fuel you and your extraordinary talents in a diverse and inclusive culture of globally connected teams. Learn more.
- We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package where you’ll be rewarded based on your performance and recognized for the value you bring to the business. The base salary range for this job in all geographic locations in the US is $106,900 to $176,500. The base salary range for New York City Metro Area, Washington State and California (excluding Sacramento) is $128,400 to $200,600. Individual salaries within those ranges are determined through a wide variety of factors including but not limited to education, experience, knowledge, skills and geography. In addition, our Total Rewards package includes medical and dental coverage, pension and 401(k) plans, and a wide range of paid time off options.
- Join us in our team-led and leader-enabled hybrid model. Our expectation is for most people in external, client serving roles to work together in person 40-60% of the time over the course of an engagement, project or year.
- Under our flexible vacation policy, you’ll decide how much vacation time you need based on your own personal circumstances. You’ll also be granted time off for designated EY Paid Holidays, Winter/Summer breaks, Personal/Family Care, and other leaves of absence when needed to support your physical, financial, and emotional well-being.
Are you ready to shape your future with confidence? Apply today.
EY accepts applications for this position on an on-going basis.
For those living in California, please click here for additional information.
EY focuses on high-ethical standards and integrity among its employees and expects all candidates to demonstrate these qualities.
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