Cloud Engineer and Site Reliability (SME) - Senior Manager

The opportunity

AI-enabled services need cloud foundations that remain secure, observable, recoverable, and cost-aware as workloads change. You will serve as the hands-on technical authority for the engineering practices that move these services from experimentation into dependable production use.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who enjoys solving the problems other teams cannot. You will use AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate infrastructure and automation work, apply your expertise to verify the results, and guide difficult decisions about architecture, performance, resilience, recovery, and cost across multiple use cases.

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

• Build shared cloud foundations. Create reusable infrastructure, environment patterns, and deployment automation that help teams start quickly and operate consistently.
• Use AI-assisted engineering responsibly. Apply AI tools to accelerate development and investigation while independently reviewing, debugging, testing, and validating the resulting code.
• Guide complex designs. Review architectures, migrations, and releases where trade-offs affect reliability, security, performance, cost, or multiple use cases.
• Strengthen production readiness. Define the evidence required before launch and identify what must change when a service is not ready to operate reliably.
• Set reliability practices. Establish service objectives, observability standards, actionable alerts, and operational reviews that connect system behavior to user outcomes.
• Make cost and capacity visible. Test workload assumptions and use performance, consumption, and demand evidence to guide scaling and architecture decisions.
• Resolve difficult failures. Lead deep investigation across distributed services and integrations, verify root causes against system evidence, and test durable fixes.
• Prove resilience. Design performance tests, failure simulations, recovery exercises, and rollback paths that show how services behave under stress.
• Turn lessons into reusable capabilities. Publish tested reference implementations, guidance, and runbooks that state both the intended use and important limitations.
• Raise engineering capability. Coach engineers, challenge assumptions constructively, and transition proven capabilities to ongoing owners with clear operating responsibilities.

Skills and attributes for success

• Deep cloud expertise: Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, with the ability to reason across system layers.
• Hands-on engineering: Ability to write, review, debug, and test infrastructure code, deployment automation, and production services.
• Diagnostic judgment: Skill in using telemetry and controlled experiments to distinguish symptoms from causes and verify that a fix works.
• Reliability leadership: Practical command of service objectives, capacity, resilience, recovery, incident learning, and operational readiness.
• AI workload awareness: Understanding of how model services, retrieval, and agent workflows introduce additional dependencies, failure modes, and costs.
• Technical influence: The credibility to explain difficult trade-offs, set standards through evidence, and help teams adopt better engineering practices.

To qualify you must have

• Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field of study.
• 9-12+ years of relevant experience.
• Relevant experience: Substantial experience designing and operating cloud, infrastructure, platform, or site reliability capabilities in production.
• Technical depth: A record of solving complex distributed-system problems and explaining why the chosen solution will work.
• Cloud engineering: Hands-on expertise with infrastructure as code, modern runtime platforms, networking, identity, and delivery automation.
• Production reliability: Experience defining service objectives and using observability, capacity planning, and recovery testing to improve live systems.
• Incident leadership: Evidence of investigating difficult failures, supporting response, and converting lessons into durable remediation.
• Automation judgment: Strong coding skills and the ability to validate AI-generated or otherwise automated engineering output independently.
• Cross-team influence: Experience mentoring engineers and guiding architecture or readiness decisions without relying on formal delivery ownership.
• 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

• AI production systems: Experience operating model-serving, retrieval, or agent workloads with demanding reliability and performance needs.
• Hybrid environments: Experience designing portable patterns across cloud, hybrid, or multi-region environments.
• Performance and economics: Experience connecting capacity, latency, throughput, and cost to service design and scaling decisions.
• High-assurance delivery: Experience in regulated or confidential environments with formal security, resilience, or evidence requirements.
• Community contribution: Practical contributions to cloud-native, infrastructure, SRE, observability, automation, 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.

• 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 – $172,800 to $359,000
  • Bay Area California offices – $180,000 to $374,000
  • All other offices locations in the US, including Sacramento – $144,000 to $329,100
• 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.
• For those living in California, please click here for additional information.
• At EY, our values set the foundation for how we work and the behaviors we expect of our people. Any misrepresentation or falsification of information or lack of integrity at any point in the recruiting process may result in withdrawal of your candidacy, revocation of an offer or immediate termination of employment.

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.