Advanced Forward Engineering - Data Engineer - Senior

About the role

The Advanced Forward Engineering (AFE) team within EY's Office of the CTO is composed of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) embedded with strategic clients to ensure optimal customer experience with EY’s products. This role involves deploying AI-native systems directly into highly regulated client environments such as tax, finance, and risk.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the data owner within an AFE delivery pod, ensuring data readiness does not hinder delivery outcomes.
• Design and implement data ingestion, transformation, and access patterns to integrate AI systems with client and legacy data sources.
• Ensure data pipelines comply with governance, security, lineage, and access control requirements mandated by regulated environments.
• Implement data interfaces and contracts that meet DevOps Specification (DS) data requirements for supported deployment templates.
• Partner closely with Forward Deployed Software Engineer roles to enable AI workflows, retrieval, and analytics that are reliable in production.
• Diagnose and resolve data quality, schema drift, and integration issues encountered in real deployment scenarios.
• Contribute reusable data patterns and implementation learnings back to the AFE integration core to improve repeatability across pods.
• Support validation, testing, and deployment activities to ensure data flows behave correctly and consistently across environments (dev, test, pre-prod, prod).

Requirements

• Deep expertise with industry standard database and data management systems (Postgres, Oracle, Databricks, SnowFlake, BigQuery, RedShift, Azure Data Factory, Kafka, Flink, Spark).
• Strong foundation in data engineering concepts applied to real production systems.
• Capable of working effectively with imperfect, heterogeneous, and legacy data environments.
• Experience in balancing delivery speed with data governance and compliance requirements.
• Practical problem-solver who can operate with ambiguity and incomplete information.
• Clear communicator able to explain data constraints and tradeoffs to engineers and stakeholders.
• Bias toward building durable, well-understood data interfaces rather than one-off solutions.
• Curiosity and flexibility when working with evolving AI and data use cases.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data integration, or analytics engineering roles.
• Hands-on experience building and operating data pipelines in cloud or hybrid environments.
• Experience integrating with relational databases, data warehouses, data lakes, or enterprise systems.
• Familiarity with data modeling, transformation frameworks, and API-based data access.
• Experience working under data governance, security, or compliance constraints.
• Ability to collaborate closely with application engineers and operate in delivery-focused teams.

Skills and Attributes

• Experience supporting AI, ML, or analytics-driven applications in production.
• Familiarity with retrieval-based systems (e.g., search, embeddings, feature stores).
• Exposure to regulated industry data environments (financial services, tax, healthcare).
• Experience with hybrid or on-prem data integration scenarios.
• Background in forward-deployed, consulting, or customer-facing engineering roles.

Benefits

At EY, we offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package, including a base salary range of $106,900 to $176,500 in the US, and $128,400 to $200,600 in the New York City Metro Area, Washington State, and California (excluding Sacramento). Individual salaries are determined based on various factors including education, experience, and location. Additionally, we provide medical and dental coverage, a pension plan, and a 401(k) plan, along with a flexible vacation policy and a wide range of paid time off options.

Pay

The base salary range for this role in the US is $106,900 to $176,500, and in the New York City Metro Area, Washington State, and California (excluding Sacramento), it is $128,400 to $200,600.

Schedule

We offer a flexible vacation policy where you decide how much vacation time you need based on your 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 well-being.

What We Offer

At EY, we develop you with future-focused skills and equip you with world-class experiences. We empower you in a flexible environment and fuel your extraordinary talents in a diverse and inclusive culture of globally connected teams. Learn more about what we offer.

EY Commitment

EY is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities including veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and need assistance applying online or requesting 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.