Lead AI Architect & Principal Engineer

EPAM Systems Inc

United States

Remote

USD 180,000 - 260,000

Full time

2 days ago

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Job summary

EPAM Systems Inc. seeks 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 ensure our agentic systems are reliable,

Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience in distributed backend systems.
6+ years of Python, with FastAPI, AsyncIO, and typing.
3+ years building production systems with LLMs (LangChain, LangGraph, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI).
3–4 years of React and TypeScript experience, reviewing UI code and streaming APIs.

Responsibilities

Set architectural direction across multiple AI pods, balancing model capabilities, cost, latency, and complexity.
Spend ~1/3 of time coding backend AI services and integration contracts.
Design agent workflows with streaming responses and low latency for chat and tasks.
Establish standards for MCP servers, tool schemas, and context management.
Work with security and infrastructure teams to enforce least-privilege execution and secret handling.
Define observability and SLAs with tracing tools.
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through design reviews.