Lead AI Adoption & Delivery Architect

EPAM Systems; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

EPAM Systems Inc. is seeking a Lead AI‑Native Engineer to raise a team's AI maturity and prove it with numbers. The role designs and ships AI systems, measuring success by improvements in adoption, production rollout, and quality metrics.

You will lead AI adoption for squads, design the delivery pipeline, track metrics, and coach engineers toward more autonomous delivery while working with clients to demonstrate value.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with LLM or agent systems.
• 2+ years in a lead, architect, mentoring or customer-adoption capacity.
• Showcase of moving 3 or more engineers up a level, or moving a customer team from pilot to production use, with numbers to show it.
• Background in a production AI system with quantitative outcomes (accuracy, cycle time, cost, hours saved, adoption), the failure modes encountered, and the structural fixes.
• Expertise in AI work that runs without daily attention, multi-step LLM or agent design with tool restriction and schemas, an evaluation approach, and structural fixes for wrong output.
• Understanding of trade-offs named: what was chosen, what was rejected and why, ideally across more than one project.
• Track record in adoption: first wins, metrics, tuning, and how resistance was handled.
• Proficiency in a cost-control approach that others follow, including a measured reduction that kept quality.
• Familiarity with a documented operating model that a peer can run without the candidate.
• Skills in clear communication with outcomes and lessons from real situations, including with skeptical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI adoption for a squad or customer team: choose the first wins, handle resistance (vendor teams, sceptical senior engineers, delivery pressure), and build trust before changing process
• Design the delivery pipeline and its human gates, choose the model mix, MCP servers, tool sets and skill registry, and set the tool-restriction policy
• Track adoption and quality metrics (acceptance rate, PR cycle time, defect density, AI-touched PR ratio), tune the workflow from them, and report outcomes to leadership
• Set how the team or product tracks and controls AI cost: cost per task or outcome, budgets and alerts
• Coach engineers up a level and review the skills and agents they create
• Represent the AI delivery model to client and business stakeholders: explain trade-offs and hold the delivery model under scope pressure
• Document the operating model so a peer can run it without you
• Harvest reusable skills, patterns and reference architectures back to the wider organization
• Keep a documented path towards more autonomous delivery, and decide which steps are safe to remove human review from
• Keep designing and shipping AI systems: multi-stage LLM pipelines and agents with a curated tool set, backed by evaluation

Job description

EPAM Systems Inc. is seeking a Lead AI‑Native Engineer to raise a team's AI maturity and prove it with numbers. The role designs and ships AI systems, measuring success by improvements in adoption, production rollout, and quality metrics.

You will lead AI adoption for squads, design the delivery pipeline, track metrics, and coach engineers toward more autonomous delivery while working with clients to demonstrate value.