AI Systems Architect & Principal Software Engineer

EPAM Systems; Austin (TX); Remote; USD 140,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Health Savings Account

Flexible Spending Accounts (Healthcare

Disability insurance

Life and AD&D Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

LinkedIn Learning access

401(k) matching

Job summary

EPAM Systems, Austin, TX is seeking an Architect / Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our AI Engineering pods. You will split your time between hands‑on engineering (about 30% to 40% prototyping core workflows, building reference implementations, and reviewing code) and higher‑level system architecture, technical standards, and mentorship across teams.

You will work closely with US‑based Product, Security, Data, and Infrastructure teams to make sure our agentic

Qualifications

• 10+ years building distributed backend systems.
• 6+ years Python, FastAPI, AsyncIO, typing.
• 3+ years with LLMs using LangChain, OpenAI, or AWS Bedrock.
• Experience with LangGraph or similar stateful agent frameworks.
• 3-4 years React/TypeScript and frontend integration.
• Production AWS with EKS/ECS, Lambda, S3, Docker, Terraform.
• OAuth 2.0 and OIDC security fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Set architectural direction across multiple AI pods, balancing model capabilities, cost, latency, and complexity.
• Spend ~1/3 of time in code: backend AI services, orchestration patterns, integration contracts with frontend teams.
• Design agent workflows with streaming responses and low latency for chat and automated tasks.
• Establish shared standards for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, tool schemas, and context management.
• Collaborate with Okta Security and Infrastructure to enforce least-privilege tool execution, tenant isolation, and secret handling within agent loops.
• Define observability requirements and SLIs/SLOs, including tracing with LangSmith or Arize Phoenix.
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through design reviews and guidance.

Skills

Distributed backend design

Python (FastAPI, AsyncIO)

LLM integration

React/TypeScript proficiency

AWS Cloud

Security fundamentals

Code reviews/mentorship

Tools

LangGraph

LangChain

AWS Bedrock

OpenAI APIs

Docker

Terraform/OpenTofu

Job description

EPAM Systems, Austin, TX is seeking an Architect / Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our AI Engineering pods. You will split your time between hands‑on engineering (about 30% to 40% prototyping core workflows, building reference implementations, and reviewing code) and higher‑level system architecture, technical standards, and mentorship across teams.

You will work closely with US‑based Product, Security, Data, and Infrastructure teams to make sure our agentic