Frontier AI Research Lead & Solutions Architect

EPAM Systems; New York (NY); On-site; USD 250,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance (

Health Savings Account

Flexible Spending Accounts

Short-Term and Long-Term Disability

Life and AD&D Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

LinkedIn learning access

Matched 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Paid Time Off (15-25 days)

Paid Holidays (9 days)

Legal Plan and Identity Theft

Accident Insurance

Employee Discounts

Pet Insurance

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Discretionary annual bonus program

Discretionary Long-Term Incentive (LTI

Job summary

EPAM Systems is seeking a Senior Director for Frontier AI Research to drive research-to-delivery initiatives, translating frontier objectives into scalable programs. You will collaborate with researchers, engineers, and customers to define metrics, design evaluations, and architect data-driven training signals.

You will lead with deep ML expertise, communicate complex concepts to technical and business teams, and shape offerings across RL environments, SFT, RLHF, and verification.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in machine learning, AI research, or research engineering.
• Strong understanding of model training, post-training lifecycle (SFT, RLHF, reward modeling).
• Ability to translate ambiguous goals into structured experiments, datasets, evaluations, or environments.

Responsibilities

• Engage with researchers, engineers, and leaders to understand objectives.
• Translate goals into target capabilities, failure modes, and success criteria.
• Design evaluation approaches, benchmarks, rubrics, and graders; analyze outputs for improvements.
• Help architect RL environments, reward functions, and verifiers for reliable signals.
• Design training data programs (SFT, preference data, RLHF) with clear distributions and quality.
• Translate customer needs into repeatable Frontier AI offerings and assets.
• Partner with Platform/Operations to plan tooling and infrastructure.
• Support Frontier AI Sellers as SME from discovery to solution design.
• Create customer-ready solution designs and pilot plans with research credibility.
• Provide oversight to ensure research intent is preserved in delivery.

Skills

Python

ML frameworks

LLM APIs

Evaluation tooling

Strong communication

Research experience

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Advanced degree in CS/ML/AI/Statistics

Job description

EPAM Systems is seeking a Senior Director for Frontier AI Research to drive research-to-delivery initiatives, translating frontier objectives into scalable programs. You will collaborate with researchers, engineers, and customers to define metrics, design evaluations, and architect data-driven training signals.

You will lead with deep ML expertise, communicate complex concepts to technical and business teams, and shape offerings across RL environments, SFT, RLHF, and verification.