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 customers to ensure optimal customer experiences with EY’s products. Specifically, the role of Data Engineer 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 enhance 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).
• A 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.
• A pragmatic problem-solver who can operate with ambiguity and incomplete information.
• A clear communicator able to explain data constraints and tradeoffs to engineers and stakeholders.
• A 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.
• Familiarity with data modeling, transformation frameworks, and API-based data access.
• Experience integrating with relational databases, data warehouses, data lakes, or enterprise systems.
• 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.

Pay

The base salary range for this role in the US is $106,900 to $176,500. For the New York City Metro Area, Washington State, and California (excluding Sacramento), the range is $128,400 to $200,600. Individual salaries are determined based on various factors including education, experience, and location.

Schedule

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. Employees are also granted time off for designated EY Paid Holidays, Winter/Summer breaks, Personal/Family Care, and other leaves of absence when needed to support their well-being.