About this role
Summary: Design and engineer agentic AI systems that execute complex workflows with deterministic steps, tool integration, and safety controls. The role involves building dependable tools, shaping agent behavior, and ensuring secure, observable, and recoverable execution in production environments.
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
Build AI agents that carry meaningful work from intent to a verified outcome, not merely produce an impressive response. You will engineer the execution loops, tools, context, permissions, evaluations, and runtime controls that let agents operate across complex workflows while remaining understandable, steerable, and safe when systems or assumptions fail.
This role sits where applied AI, distributed systems, and product engineering meet. You will work on long-running behavior, real enterprise integrations, and difficult production failures, deciding when a deterministic workflow is enough, when autonomy adds value, and whether each added degree of freedom earns its operational and user-experience cost.
About Challenger
Challenger is a new EY program focused on building the firm’s next generation of services. It pursues opportunities where AI enables a fundamentally different service and way of delivering it, including rethinking existing offerings and developing new ones.
Small, dedicated teams build and test ideas in real conditions. Solutions that demonstrate clear business value and operational readiness transition to the business for adoption and scale.
Challenger Core develops and maintains the shared technology, methods, and risk and quality guardrails that support this work. Each team contributes reusable tools and practices, helping make the next service faster and less costly to build.
Your key responsibilities
- Choose the right execution model. Design agent architectures that use deterministic steps, a single-agent loop, or coordinated agents only when measured performance justifies the complexity.
- Build dependable tools. Create connectors and interfaces with clear contracts, validated outcomes, narrow authorization, and errors that help the agent recover or escalate.
- Engineer agent behavior. Shape planning, routing, delegation, stopping, retry, and handoff behavior across complete workflows.
- Create durable context. Combine instructions, user state, retrieval, memory, and environment feedback while preserving relevance, provenance, freshness, and permitted access.
- Bound agent authority. Implement scoped identities, credentials, budgets, approval points, and emergency containment so agents act within explicit limits.
- Evaluate complete trajectories. Build representative tests that measure verified task success, tool use, recovery, human takeover, and prohibited actions rather than isolated responses.
- Operate long-running execution. Use durable state, checkpointing, safe retries, versioned releases, rollback, and graceful degradation to keep work recoverable.
- Make behavior observable. Instrument end-to-end traces and replay so teams can understand failures, diagnose patterns, and turn production evidence into improvements.
- Protect user control. Design clear intervention points so people can inspect, interrupt, redirect, and safely resume agent work.
- Build shared capability. Partner across product, platform, knowledge, security, and evaluation teams and publish reusable agent patterns and operational lessons.
Skills and attributes for success
- Production engineering: Strong software engineering and distributed-systems judgment, with practical experience building services that remain dependable under failure.
- Agent architecture: Ability to reason about planning, tools, state, handoffs, and coordination while choosing a simpler workflow when it performs better.
- AI application depth: Practical knowledge of model APIs, structured outputs, context, retrieval, memory, experimentation, and tool use.
- Evaluation discipline: Experience measuring complete trajectories and verified outcomes for systems whose behavior is variable.
- Security and operability: Strong instincts for least privilege, tool boundaries, observability, resilience, recovery, and accountable human intervention.
- Product judgment: Ability to balance quality, latency, cost, and user control and explain technical trade-offs clearly across disciplines.
To qualify you must have
- Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field of study.
- Relevant experience: 7-9 years of experience in software or applied machine-learning engineering, with ownership of production systems and their live behavior.
- Agent delivery: Hands-on evidence of shipping large-language-model applications, agents, or complex model-driven workflows used for real work.
- Programming depth: Strong capability in Python, TypeScript, or another language used for production services and integrations.
- Applied AI patterns: Experience with model APIs, structured outputs, retrieval, tool use, and evaluation of variable behavior.
- Distributed execution: Practical command of asynchronous work, state, concurrency, idempotency, retries, and failure recovery.
- Identity and controls: Experience implementing access boundaries and scoped authority for applications or automated workloads.
- Production learning: Evidence of improving live systems through traces, metrics, logs, incident analysis, and durable remediation.
- Travel and On-site requirements: This role requires up to 50% travel and flexibility to go into the office in a hybrid capacity.
Ideally, you’ll also have
- Long-running agents: Experience with durable agent execution, multi-agent systems, or human-agent collaboration.
- Enterprise tools: Experience integrating agents with permission-sensitive business systems, browsers, or computer-use environments.
- Interoperability: Experience with MCP or comparable standards, enterprise retrieval, knowledge graphs, or context services.
- High-assurance automation: Experience with sandboxed execution, durable workflow engines, or systems requiring strong evidence and control.
- Ecosystem contribution: Practical contributions to agent, evaluation, developer tooling, applied AI, or open-source communities
We welcome exceptional candidates from product, service design, operations, transformation, policy, domain, and entrepreneurial backgrounds; no particular degree or certification is required.
What we offer you
At EY, we harness our collective strength to empower you to shape your future with confidence through professional growth, personal fulfillment and an inclusive culture. Learn more at [ey.com/us/careers.](https://ey.com/us/careers)
- 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 is:
- - New York City, Boston, and Washington DC Metro Areas, Washington State, and Southern California offices – $150,700 to $251,200
- Bay Area California offices – $157,100 to $261,600
- All other offices locations in the US, including Sacramento – $125,500 to $230,200
- Individual salaries within these 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.
- 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.
- To make the most of your application experience, please limit yourself to two applications within a six-month period.
- EY accepts applications for this position on an on-going basis.
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EY | Building a better working world
EY is building a better working world by creating new value for clients, people, society and the planet, while building trust in capital markets.
Enabled by data, AI and advanced technology, EY teams help clients shape the future with confidence and develop answers for the most pressing issues of today and tomorrow.
EY teams work across a full spectrum of services in assurance, consulting, tax, strategy and transactions. Fueled by sector insights, a globally connected, multi-disciplinary network and diverse ecosystem partners, EY teams can provide services in more than 150 countries and territories.
All in to shape the future with confidence.
EY provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, genetic information, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected basis, including arrest and conviction records, in accordance with applicable law.
EY is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities including veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and either need assistance applying online or need to request an accommodation during any part of the application process, please call 1-800-EY-HELP3, select Option 2 for candidate related inquiries, then select Option 1 for candidate queries and finally select Option 2 for candidates with an inquiry which will route you to EY’s Talent Shared Services Team (TSS) or email the TSS at ssc.customersupport@ey.com.