Lead Data & AI Platform Engineer

EPAM Systems; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Great Place To Work 2024

Voice matters

Self-development courses

Job summary

EPAM Systems seeks a Lead Data & AI Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate data and AI delivery platforms across client engagements in Australia. You will lead automation, deployment, governance, observability, and reliability for data pipelines and AI systems.

This hands-on leadership role guides architectural decisions, establishes reusable engineering practices, and partners with data and AI teams to bring solutions into production.

Qualifications

• Hands-on platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or MLOps with leading delivery experience.
• Experience with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Strong IAC skills (Terraform) and CI/CD design.
• Python scripting or programming experience.
• Production data platforms and cloud-native applications expertise.
• Monitoring, logging, incident response, and troubleshooting expertise.
• Knowledge of IAM, security, secrets, networking, and governance.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of secure, scalable cloud infrastructure for data and AI workloads.
• Build reusable infrastructure and CI/CD patterns for data platforms and AI models.
• Establish operational practices including deployment, versioning, evaluation, and rollback.
• Implement observability across pipelines and AI applications (logs, metrics, traces, alerts, costs).
• Improve platform reliability through automation, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Define standards for security, IAM, secrets, networking and governance.
• Support teams deploying LLM applications and agentic systems and model integrations.
• Use AI-assisted tools to improve infra development and troubleshooting with validation.
• Collaborate with architects and stakeholders to make platform decisions and explain trade-offs.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to standards, templates, and roadmaps.

Skills

Platform engineering

DevOps

Site reliability engineering

MLOps

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Python

Cloud computing

Monitoring & logging

Security practices

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

Azure

AWS

Google Cloud

Databricks

Job description

We are seeking a Lead Data & AI Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the platforms that support data engineering and AI delivery across a range of client engagements. You will lead platform automation, deployment, governance, observability, and reliability for data pipelines, machine learning systems, LLM applications, and AI agents.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role. You will guide architectural decisions, establish reusable engineering practices, and work closely with data and AI teams to bring solutions into production.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of secure, scalable cloud infrastructure for data and AI workloads
• Build reusable infrastructure and CI/CD patterns for data platforms, applications, models, and AI agents
• Establish operational practices for AI solutions, including deployment, versioning, evaluation, monitoring, and rollback
• Implement observability across pipelines and AI applications, including logs, metrics, traces, alerts, quality measures, and cost monitoring
• Improve platform reliability through automation, incident response, performance tuning, and capacity planning
• Define standards for cloud security, identity and access management, secrets, networking, and governance
• Support teams deploying LLM applications and agentic systems, including their model integrations, tool calls, and external APIs
• Use AI‑assisted tools to improve infrastructure development, troubleshooting, and operational workflows, while validating their output
• Partner with architects, engineers, and stakeholders to make platform decisions and explain technical trade‑offs
• Mentor engineers and contribute to technical standards, reusable templates, and platform roadmaps

Requirements

• Strong hands‑on experience in platform engineering, DevOps, site reliability engineering, or MLOps, with experience leading technical delivery
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform: Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud
• Strong infrastructure as code skills, such as Terraform
• Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes
• Scripting or programming experience, preferably in Python
• Experience operating data platforms, distributed workloads, or cloud‑native applications
• Strong understanding of monitoring, logging, alerting, incident response, and production troubleshooting
• Knowledge of cloud networking, identity and access management, secrets management, and security practices
• Practical understanding of AI/ML platform operations, including model deployment, versioning, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• Understanding of the operational needs of LLM applications and AI agents, including tracing, evaluation, latency, reliability, and cost
• Ability to lead technical decisions, mentor engineers, and collaborate directly with client and delivery teams

Nice to have

• Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, or similar data and AI platforms
• Experience with MLflow, model serving platforms, or model registries
• Experience deploying and observing RAG applications or agentic systems
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring for response quality
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, API gateways, or service orchestration
• Experience applying AI to operations, such as alert correlation, incident triage, or root cause analysis
• Experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, or similar tools
• Experience with Databricks Asset Bundles, Unity Catalog, or equivalent capabilities
• FinOps experience, including workload optimisation and cloud cost attribution
• Consulting experience, including platform assessments, solution design, and technical estimation

We offer

• By choosing EPAM, you're getting a job at Great Place To Work-Certified™ in 2024, Glassdoor’s Top 100 Best Places to Work in 2023 & one of Most Loved Workplace, as recognized by Newsweek, 2021 - 2023.
• Employee ideas are the main driver of our business. We have a very supportive environment where your voice matters.
• You will be challenged while working side‑by‑side with the best talent globally. We work with top‑notch technologies, constantly seeking new industry trends and best practices.
• We offer a transparent career path and an individual roadmap to engineer your future & accelerate your journey.
• At EPAM, you can find vast opportunities for self‑development: online courses and libraries, mentoring programs, partial grants of certification, and experience exchange with colleagues around the world. You will learn, contribute, and grow with us.

How We Hire

• Here, we summarize the typical journey to finding a job within EPAM.
• Go through some standard interviews:
• - General interview with a recruiter
• - Technical interview with our technology experts
• - Manager interview or Offer interview with a hiring manager
• Not sure if you meet all the requirements? No problem. Let's talk anyway and find out more!

Life at EPAM

• We are a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and development services that has rapidly grown in Australia since 2013.
• We adopt a global growth strategy, thinking and acting like start‑ups, working in multi‑disciplinary teams, and delivering results. With a multinational talented team, we have been delivering innovative solutions for cloud migration, cyber security, digital transformation, etc.
• You will work in an open and friendly work environment where your professional skills and experience can stand out.