Enterprise AI Architect & Strategy Lead

EPAM Systems Inc; McLean (VA); Remote; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance (

Health Savings Account

Flexible Spending Accounts

Disability Insurance

Life and AD&D Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

LinkedIn Learning Solutions

401(k) Matching

Paid Time Off

Paid Holidays

Employee Discounts

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Discretionary Bonus Program

Long-Term Incentive Program

Job summary

EPAM Systems, Inc. is seeking an AI Architect to design AI-native architectures for enterprise applications, including RAG systems, agents, and autonomous workflows.

You will define system scope, guardrails, and evaluation methods, balancing business needs with technical feasibility. The role requires hands-on coding ability, experience with distributed systems, cloud data flows, and clear communication to executives.

Qualifications

• Architect AI-native systems in production, including RAG, assistants, agents or agentic workflows with real business context.
• Proven track record as software/solution architect with AI initiative in last year.
• Delivery accountability for shipped, maintained systems.
• Experience with distributed systems, cloud and enterprise data-flow.
• Ability to surface ambiguities and justify explicit trade-offs.
• Experience presenting options, costs and risks to non-technical decision makers.
• Documentation habit: architecture decision records and reference architectures.
• Recent hands-on coding to prototype and validate constraints.
• Understanding AI-assisted development and architect role evolution.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end AI-native architectures: orchestration, retrieval, tool integration, agent autonomy and guardrails, identity, evaluation, observability, and cost model.
• Tailor solutions to business scope and explain what is left out and why.
• Convert conflicting requirements into explicit business decisions with ownership.
• Document architectural trade-offs (build vs buy, model choice, retrieval strategy, autonomy level, cost vs quality) for stakeholders.
• Define evaluation strategies to ensure business-fit, not just fluent outputs.
• Author constraints, guidelines, and fitness functions for engineering teams and agents.
• Determine where humans stay in the loop for regulated decisions and data of record.
• Collaborate with EPAM delivery teams and presales to shape proposals and reviews.
• Build PoCs or reference implementations when needed as evidence.
• Contribute to EPAM AI architecture practice with reference architectures.

Skills

AI Architecture

Distributed Systems

Cloud Dataflow

Requirements trade-offs

Stakeholder communication

Hands-on coding

Job description

EPAM Systems, Inc. is seeking an AI Architect to design AI-native architectures for enterprise applications, including RAG systems, agents, and autonomous workflows.

You will define system scope, guardrails, and evaluation methods, balancing business needs with technical feasibility. The role requires hands-on coding ability, experience with distributed systems, cloud data flows, and clear communication to executives.