DE-Application Engineering Technical Lead-W5-AWMT0033

Technology Consulting

Title: Senior Manager I, Application Engineering Technical Lead

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. Technology is at the heart of what we do and deliver at EY. Technology solutions are integrated in the client services we deliver and are key to our innovation as an organization. 

Fueled by strategic investment in technology and innovation, Client Technology seeks to drive growth opportunities and solve complex business problems for our clients through building a robust platform for business and powerful product engine that are vital to innovation at scale. As part of Client Technology, you’ll work with technologists and business experts, blending EY’s deep industry knowledge and innovative ideas with our platforms, capabilities, and technical expertise. As a catalyst for change and growth, you’ll be at the forefront of integrating emerging technologies from AI to Data Analytics into every corner of what we do at EY. That means more growth for you, exciting learning opportunities, career choices, and the chance to make a real impact.

EY Technology:

Technology has always been at the heart of what we do and deliver at EY. We need technology to keep an organization the size of ours working efficiently. We have 250,000 people in more than 140 countries, all of whom rely on secure technology to be able to do their job every single day.  Everything from the laptops we use, to the ability to work remotely on our mobile devices and connecting our people and our clients, to enabling hundreds of internal tools and external solutions delivered to our clients.  Technology solutions are integrated in the client services we deliver and is key to us being more innovative as an organization.

EY Technology supports our technology needs through three business units:

Client Technology (CT) - focuses on developing new technology services for our clients. It enables EY to identify new technology-based opportunities faster and pursue those opportunities more rapidly.

Enterprise Workplace Technology (EWT) – EWT supports our Core Business Services functions and will deliver fit-for-purpose technology infrastructure at the cheapest possible cost for quality services. EWT will also support our internal technology needs by focusing on a better user experience.

Information Security (Info Sec) - Info Sec prevents, detects, responds and mitigates cyber-risk, protecting EY and client data, and our information management systems.  

The opportunity

The Senior Manager, Application Engineering Technical Lead, is responsible for leading and developing operational and reliability engineering teams to drive strong technical outcomes across end-to-end systems that directly impact client experience.  This leader builds and develops high-performing operational and reliability engineering teams, fostering a culture of resilience, continuous improvement, and technical excellence. 

In partnership with product, platform and shared services leaders, this role aligns reliability initiatives with strategic priorities and measurable client outcomes.  This role combines strategic vision, organizational influence, and deep technical expertise to evolve architecture, tooling, engineering, and DevOps practices - ensuring systems are scalable, fault-tolerant, observable, and operable.  The focus is systemic reliability engineering at scale: driving architectural and ecosystem-level change through technology, not isolated fixes. 

Your key responsibilities

Lead and develop a highly skilled/high-performing operational and reliability engineering teams, fostering a culture of resilience, innovation and continuous improvement.

Collaborate to evolve and advocate reliability and operational excellence strategies across product engineering teams and shared platforms, ensuring reliability is embedded in planning and execution.

Lead operational excellence activities, including incident response and contingency testing.

Understand failure modes, performance bottlenecks, and operational risks across end-to-end systems, and drive scalable and fault-tolerant solutions.

Drive systemic improvements in architecture, tooling, and engineering practices, and oversee architectural reviews to ensure fault tolerance, graceful degradation and recovery mechanisms are embedded in system design.

Integrate and improve existing tooling, identifying reliability gaps and delivering both short-term and long-term solutions.

Continuously evolve reliability and operational excellence engineering practices through hands-on contributions and cross-functional collaboration.

Hires, evaluates, and supervises crew. Provides guidance and training as necessary to develop crew. Sets performance standards, reviews performance, and makes informed compensation decisions in accordance with all applicable Human Resources policies and procedures.

Provides the most senior level IT technical lead and architecture services and direction for critical software, middleware, or hardware projects on multiple platforms. Provides technical expertise and completes complex development, design, implementation, architecture design specification, and maintenance activities.

Leads and ensures the viability of IT deliverables. Provides development and architectural options and approves the team's technical deliverables. Conducts testing, including functionality, technical limitations, and security. Provides production support for products.

Identifies potential solutions and approves technical solutions proposed by team members. Elevates complex technical issues to IT experts. Resolves technical problems discovered by testers and internal clients. Responds to and resolves technical issues in a timely manner. Researches issues and performs root cause analysis. Anticipates technology problems and prevents them. Resolves potential technology problems implemented by less experience staff before they cause an issue.

Communicates with key stakeholders on project issues and implications. Evaluates the impacts of change requests on technologies and effectively persuades and influences others on ideas.

Maintains a current and working knowledge of IT development methodology, architecture design, and technical standards. Mentors IT staff and identifies training needs. As new standards are instituted, ensures their usage by team members. Learns, and applies new technology quickly, and is well versed on the latest technologies and tools supporting software development in the industry. Assists with the creation of strategic product roadmaps.

Reviews and approves documentation and diagrams created by IT team members. Writes documentation, including technical standards and processes.

Identifies opportunities for continuous quality improvement of technical standards, methodologies, and technologies.

Develops code and test artifacts that reuse subroutines or objects, is well structured, backed by automated tests, includes sufficient comments and is easy to maintain. Writes programs, appropriate test artifacts, ad hoc queries, and reports. Employs contemporary software development techniques to ensure tests are implemented in a way that supports automation.

Amplifies the productivity of entire team through collaboration, and the implementation of technology frameworks. Learns and applies new technology quickly, and is well versed on the latest technologies and tools supporting software development in the industry. Anticipates technology problems and prevents them. Resolves potential technology problems implemented by less experience staff before they cause an issue.

Thoroughly understands and complies with Information Technology and Information Security policies and procedures, and verifies that deliverables meet requirements. Works across organizational lines to improve both IT and Information Security policies and procedures.

Maintains a broad understanding of the roles of front, middle and back office, and designs systems to enable efficient business processes while maintaining necessary controls. Maintains a broad understanding of the roles of external partners and designs systems to enable efficient business processes while maintaining necessary controls.

Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned.

Oversee data flow integration between multiple APIs and systems for consistent, secure, and streamlined application performance.

Drive cross-functional collaboration across development, UX, and infrastructure teams, aligning systems architecture with end-user needs and enterprise objectives.

Establish and govern software documentation standards to ensure clarity, maintainability, and ease of future upgrades.

Skills and attributes for success

Solid track record of building and developing high-performing teams in a global environment.

Proven experience leading architecture, reliability, platform engineering teams in a DevOps environment.  Solid understanding of reliability engineering principles is a must.

Ability to apply broad technical knowledge and cross-domain thinking to solve complex reliability challenges.  Strong curiosity and ability to explore unfamiliar technologies and domains by applying foundational principles.

Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, failure modes, and performance tuning techniques.

Familiarity with networking basics, compute infrastructure, Linux operating systems, relational and document data stores, event-driven messaging architectures, batch processing, and the AWS ecosystem.

Application development experience in a cloud-first tech stack with product- oriented design and development.

Experience designing and operating multi-region and multi-cloud architectures.

Knowledge of generative AI systems is a plus.

Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and organizational influence skills.

To qualify for the role, you must have

Minimum 10 years of relevant work experience, with at least 5 years in a mangerial role with a strong focus on application engineering.

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

Ideally, you’ll also have

Strong verbal and written communication, facilitation, relationship-building, presentation and negotiation skills.

Be highly flexible, adaptable, and creative.

Comfortable interacting with senior executives (within the firm and at the client)

What we look for

Strong teamwork, work ethic, product mindset, client centricity and a relentless commitment to EY values.

What working at EY offers

We offer a competitive remuneration package where you’ll be rewarded for your individual and team performance. Our comprehensive Total Rewards package includes support for flexible working and career development, and with FlexEY you can select benefits that suit your needs, covering holidays, health and well-being, insurance, savings and a wide range of discounts, offers and promotions. Plus, we offer:

Support, coaching and feedback from some of the most engaging colleagues around

Opportunities to develop new skills and progress your career

The freedom and flexibility to handle your role in a way that’s right for you