AI and Data – Data Scientist – Senior Manager

EY delivers unparalleled cross-functional tech consulting services in artificial intelligence, big data and cloud engineering. We always support and enable big ideas with the ambition to keep doing more. We leverage leading practices and a high degree of business acumen that has been compiled over years of experience to ensure the highest level of execution and satisfaction for our clients. Our Artificial Intelligence and Data team helps apply cutting-edge technology and techniques to bring solutions to our clients. As part of that, you'll sit side-by-side with clients and diverse teams from EY to create a well-rounded approach to advising and solving challenging problems, some of which have not been solved before. Come help define the future of AI.

The opportunity

EY is significantly investing in our award-winning AI & Data practice. We are looking for a Senior Manager, Data Scientist to be a senior technical leader across our most important AI bets driving applied research, leading multi-disciplinary teams, and shaping how EY designs, builds, and scales AI solutions for our clients.

Your work will span agentic AI, foundation-model applications, retrieval and grounding, knowledge representation, machine learning, optimization, and the broader analytics landscape. A current strategic focus is the cognitive harness and memory layer that powers our agentic offerings and you will play a leading role there but the role is intentionally broader. You will move across problem spaces as our practice and our clients' priorities evolve, and you will help define which problems we tackle next.

This is a high-visibility, high-impact role at the intersection of applied research, engineering, and client delivery. You will be hands-on, you will publish, you will prototype and productize, and you will mentor a other data scientists and ML engineers tackling the hardest problems in EY's AI portfolio.

Your key responsibilities

As a Senior Manager, Data Scientist, you will be a hands-on technical leader who shapes the data-science agenda across multiple workstreams. You will own technical direction, experimentation, and the path from prototype to production for the problems you take on. You will be expected to build, not just design and to lift the bar of the team around you.

• Lead data-science strategy and execution across multiple AI workstreams including agentic AI, the cognitive harness, memory and grounding, foundation-model applications, machine learning, optimization, and applied analytics.
• Drive the applied-research and experimentation agenda long-context vs. retrieval trade-offs, hybrid search, reranking, evaluation design, model selection, fine-tuning, and emerging techniques as the field evolves.
• Design and contribute to the build of core platform components including elements of EY's cognitive harness (memory services, retrieval pipelines, grounding layers, evaluation harnesses) and other reusable AI capabilities.
• Establish evaluation and quality frameworks for AI systems retrieval and grounding fidelity, hallucination rate, model accuracy, latency, cost, fairness, and continuous evaluation in production.
• Lead and mentor data scientists and ML engineers set the technical bar, run design reviews, and grow rigor in experimentation, model selection, and production readiness.
• Partner with sector and functional teams (Finance, Risk, Tax, Supply Chain, HR, Operations) to translate business problems into rigorous, deliverable data-science programs.
• Engage with clients on complex AI problems shape the technical approach, defend it in front of senior stakeholders, and own delivery quality.
• Stay abreast of AI technology trends and provide directional guidance and recommendations around models, frameworks, tools, and patterns that fit our clients' existing ecosystems.
• Apply combined business and technical knowledge to develop and execute target architectures that enable implementation, monitoring, and ongoing improvement of AI at scale.

Skills and attributes for success

This role will work to deliver tech at speed, innovate at scale, and put humans at the center. You will provide technical guidance and share knowledge with team members with diverse skills and backgrounds. You will consistently deliver quality client services, focusing on more complex, judgmental, and specialized issues surrounding modern AI, foundation models, and emerging technology. You will demonstrate deep technical capabilities and professional knowledge, and you will lead through making.

• Strong, hands-on data scientist who codes comfortable building and shipping models, pipelines, services, and experimental frameworks, not just specifying them.
• Deep technical breadth across modern AI foundation models and prompting, retrieval and grounding, embeddings and fine-tuning, classical ML, optimization, and experimentation rigor.
• Working knowledge of agentic systems and cognitive harness / agent-runtime architectures — memory, tools, policies, evaluation, observability, cost and the trade-offs between them.
• Familiarity with at least one major agent SDK (Google ADK, AWS Bedrock AgentCore, LangGraph, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents SDK) and the ability to compare them critically.
• Experience designing and operating production AI systems on cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure, Databricks) including responsible-AI guardrails, monitoring, and continuous evaluation.
• Track record of leading data-science teams across multiple projects setting technical strategy, mentoring, and raising the bar on rigor and delivery quality.
• Excellent communication skills able to explain complex AI concepts to executive clients, and able to defend technical choices in front of architects, engineers, and researchers.
• Comfortable moving between problem spaces — equally credible designing a memory architecture, evaluating a forecasting model, or shaping a new agentic workflow.

To qualify for the role you must have

• PhD preferred in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, or a closely related quantitative field. Master's with exceptional applied experience also considered.
• 12+ years of applied data science / ML experience, with at least 3 years in a senior technical leadership role.
• Demonstrable experience taking AI and ML systems from prototype to production — across multiple problem types (e.g., predictive modeling, NLP, retrieval / RAG, optimization, or agentic workflows).
• Hands-on proficiency in Python and the modern ML/AI stack (PyTorch, Hugging Face, scikit-learn, and at least one of LangChain / LangGraph or an equivalent agent / LLM framework).
• Practical experience with at least one major cloud AI platform (Vertex AI, Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, Databricks Mosaic AI) and one vector / retrieval stack.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for AI systems — beyond standard benchmarks — including evaluation for foundation-model-based or agentic workflows.
• Experience operating in a client-facing or cross-functional environment, translating business problems into rigorous data-science programs.

Ideally, you will also have

• Published research or open-source contributions in AI / ML agentic systems, retrieval, memory and grounding, knowledge graphs, foundation models, optimization, or related areas.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, and neuro-symbolic approaches to grounding and reasoning.
• Experience building or contributing to a cognitive harness, agent operating system, or agent runtime — internal or open source.
• Experience with continual learning, online evaluation, drift detection, and model / memory monitoring in production.
• Familiarity with regulated-industry constraints (SOX, HIPAA, GDPR) and how AI design interacts with audit, retention, and explainability.
• Prior consulting, product, or hyperscaler experience — comfortable in a fast, ambiguous environment with senior stakeholders.

What we look for

We are looking for a data-science leader who is genuinely excited about hard technical problems and who is as comfortable in a research paper as in a production codebase. You should be the kind of person who treats AI systems as engineered products designed, evaluated, and operated with rigor and who wants to lead a team that ships to Fortune 500 clients across multiple industries.

What we offer

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. 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. Plus, we offer:

• Continuous learning develop the mindset and skills to navigate whatever comes next.
• Success as defined by you we provide the tools and flexibility to make a meaningful impact, your way.
• Transformative leadership insights, coaching, and confidence to be the leader the world needs.
• Diverse and inclusive culture embraced for who you are, empowered to use your voice to help others find theirs.