Lead AI Architect - Engineering, Architecture

Fueled by strategic investment in technology and innovation, Client Technology seeks to drive growth opportunities and solve complex business problems for our clients through architecting an AI-enabled agentic solutions for professional services delivery that are integral to innovation at scale. You will work with technologists and business specialists, blending EY’s deep industry knowledge and innovative ideas with our platforms, capabilities, and technical expertise. As part of a strategic team, you will lead the solution architecture for one of the major Oceania agentic solution initiatives, modernizing and integrating multiple existing products used in GCR professional services delivery. Reporting into the OCTO Lead Architect, you will collaborate closely with product, engineering, data, security, and regional teams to ensure solutions are pragmatic, scalable, and aligned with global Tax and Client Technology strategy. That means more growth for you, exciting learning opportunities, career choices, and the chance to make a real impact.

The opportunity

We are looking for a Lead AI Architect to own the solution architecture for a major Oceania agentic initiative that will modernize, agentify, and integrate multiple existing products used in local and global GCR professional services delivery for one of Oceania’s largest clients. This role delivers pragmatic, cost-efficient solution designs that leverage generative AI, agentic patterns, and enterprise platform capabilities while ensuring alignment with global architecture standards and security requirements.

You will:

• Ensure end-to-end architecture integrity of the agentic solution across business process design, AI architecture, application architecture, data/knowledge architecture, integration, security, and operations.
• Ensure the solution avoids unnecessary complexity while still supporting enterprise-scale reuse, extensibility, and production readiness.
• Define, document, and maintain architecture decisions, patterns, assumptions, risks, constraints, and trade-offs throughout the initiative.
• Align the Oceania agentic solution with global architecture standards, Tax technology strategy, EY security requirements, and approved AI platform direction.
• Clarify the boundary between business self-service, product/platform configuration, and engineering-led implementation for complex agentic capabilities.
• Identify platform and capability gaps in AET, Azure, integration services, data access, knowledge retrieval, telemetry, or operational support, and drive those gaps into the appropriate backlog or escalation path.
• Define a repeatable deployment and reuse model that enables regional adoption while reducing duplicated work, inconsistent implementations, and unmanaged local variation.
• Drive AI governance and quality practices, including model selection rationale, prompt and agent evaluation, safety and grounding controls, observability, cost management, and production support patterns.
• Ensure the architecture supports secure access to enterprise data and knowledge sources, with appropriate identity, authorization, data privacy, sovereignty, lineage, and audit considerations.
• Partner with engineering to ensure architecture designs are implementation-ready and can be delivered within realistic timeline, cost, and platform constraints.
• Produce clear stakeholder-facing architecture materials, including executive summaries, solution blueprints, decision logs, reusable pattern guidance, and implementation recommendations.
• Surface risks early, including unrealistic reuse assumptions, insufficient platform maturity, integration gaps, country capability differences, cost exposure, and operational readiness concerns.

Your key responsibilities

• Lead the solution and technical architecture for one of the major Oceania agentic solution initiatives, ensuring the architecture is pragmatic, scalable, reusable, secure, and aligned with global Tax and Client Technology strategy.
• Own the overall solution architecture that will modernize, agentify, and integrate multiple existing products used in the local and global GCR professional services delivery for one of Oceania's largest clients, from solutioning through delivery phases, working closely with the engineering team to deliver it successfully.
• Define the target-state architecture for agentic capabilities, including agent orchestration, tool and skill integration, knowledge retrieval, workflow automation, telemetry, security, and operational support.
• Translate business needs from Oceania, Australia, and related regional stakeholders into clear architecture decisions, implementation patterns, and delivery-ready solution designs.
• Assess existing regional and locally built agentic assets for reuse potential, platform fit, integration complexity, and alignment with an AET-first strategy.
• Drive rapid POC and fail-fast architecture validation for agentic use cases, including trial balance cleansing, trial balance mapping, review agents, and adjacent automation scenarios.
• Determine when capabilities should be delivered through AET, when a hybrid Azure approach is required, and when gaps should be escalated for global architecture, product, or leadership decisioning.
• Partner with product management, engineering, data, security, risk, operations, and regional teams to define architecture blueprints, integration approaches, dependency maps, and implementation guardrails.
• Establish reusable AI architecture patterns that can be applied across countries and regions without creating one-off, fragmented, or locally ungoverned implementations.
• Lead architecture review sessions and ensure solution designs meet non-functional requirements for security, scalability, reliability, availability, maintainability, observability, and cost efficiency.
• Define AI quality and evaluation practices, including RAG grounding validation, prompt and model assessment, hallucination controls, agent behavior testing, and feedback-driven improvement loops.
• Provide hands-on architectural guidance to engineering teams during design, build, integration, testing, deployment, and production readiness activities.
• Communicate complex AI, data, and platform architecture decisions clearly to senior stakeholders, business sponsors, product owners, engineers, and regional implementation teams.
• Collaborate with the OCTO Lead Architect to ensure alignment with the overall Oceania Tax strategic direction.
• Mentor technical leads supporting the initiative, with a focus on practical AI architecture, reusable design patterns, and disciplined delivery governance.

To qualify for the role, you must have

A working and architectural knowledge of the following technologies is required to effectively assess platform capabilities, define integration strategies, and guide technical decisions.

• Microsoft Azure cloud architecture, including application, integration, identity, networking, security, monitoring, and production operations patterns.
• Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI model consumption patterns, including model deployment, prompt engineering, model governance, evaluation, and cost-aware usage.
• Generative AI and agentic architecture patterns, including agent orchestration, tool calling, skills, workflows, memory, planning, human-in-the-loop controls, and deterministic fallback paths.
• Retrieval Augmented Generation architecture, including document ingestion, chunking, metadata enrichment, vector indexing, hybrid search, grounding, citations, and retrieval quality evaluation.
• AI evaluation and quality tooling, including model evaluation, prompt evaluation, RAG assessment, hallucination testing, safety testing, regression testing, and continuous feedback loops.
• Enterprise integration architecture, including REST APIs, event-driven integration, workflow integration, system-to-system authentication, API management, and legacy platform integration.
• Secure AI and data architecture, including identity and access management, RBAC/ABAC, private networking, encryption, secrets management, data privacy, auditability, and information protection.
• Observability for AI-enabled solutions, including agent traces, prompt and completion logging where permitted, token usage, latency, cost tracking, success/failure metrics, telemetry, and operational dashboards.
• Data and knowledge architecture, including structured and unstructured data sources, document intelligence, semantic metadata, data lineage, data quality, retention, and access control design.
• Application architecture for distributed, scalable products and services, including microservices, modular components, reusable APIs, configuration-driven behavior, and cloud-native deployment practices.
• DevSecOps and engineering delivery practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, secure build and release pipelines, backlog alignment, and environment management.
• Architecture documentation and collaboration tools such as architecture decision records, solution architecture documents, diagrams, roadmaps, backlog items, and stakeholder-ready design materials.

Ideally, you’ll also have

• AET platform capabilities, constraints, delivery model, and fit for reusable agentic solution patterns.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and related enterprise AI assistant or agent development capabilities.
• Beehive, TRACE, OneSource, and other Tax platform capabilities that may need to expose or consume agentic functionality.
• Existing Spain/Madrid and UK built agent solutions, especially those related to touchless tax return.
• Microsoft Agent Framework or similar orchestration and agent development frameworks.
• Azure AI Search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, semantic search, knowledge graph patterns, and enterprise document intelligence pipelines.
• Azure API Management, Logic Apps, Functions, Service Bus, Event Grid, Container Apps, AKS, App Service, Key Vault, Application Insights, and Azure Monitor.
• AI gateways, model routing, guardrails, policy enforcement, prompt management, and centralized AI observability platforms.
• Financial, tax, compliance, or trial balance business process knowledge, especially where AI agents are used to support repeatable review, mapping, cleansing, reconciliation, or exception-handling workflows.
• Experience working in globally distributed delivery models across product, engineering, architecture, regional, and country teams.

What we look for

We are looking for people who are self-starters, who can take initiative and get things done! If you can lead a team of architects to think critically and creatively solve problems, you will excel in this role. You should be comfortable working with culturally diverse outsourced on/offshore team members which means you may be required to work outside of the normal working hours in your time zone to partner with other Client Technology staff globally. Some travel may also be required, both domestic and international.