Senior AI-Native Systems Architect & Lead Engineer

EPAM Systems; Georgia; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private health insurance

EPAM Employees Stock Purchase Plan

100% paid sick leave

Referral Program

Professional certification

Language courses

Flexible working model with remotework

Job summary

EPAM Systems is seeking a senior engineer to design and ship AI-native systems end-to-end, including agents, workflows, RAG, and the harness. You will implement custom tool calling, sandboxing, and context engineering while ensuring observability and scale.

You will collaborate with SMEs and end-users to understand real value, build evaluation pipelines, and design for failure with retries and human-in-the-loop controls. A strong Python background and cloud deployment experience are essential.

Qualifications

• 7+ years engineering experience in production AI/LLM apps.
• Strong agent-design judgment for task-harness fit and context.
• Able to lead discovery with SMEs and end-users, explaining trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Hands-on with LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel and major LLM providers.
• Expert-level Python and solid software engineering fundamentals.
• Strong RAG and retrieval skills; experience with vector databases and context management.
• Experience with AWS/Azure/GCP and containerization; CI/CD.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and ship AI-native systems E2E — agents, workflows, RAG and the harness: custom tool calling, sandboxing, context engineering and sub-agents, caching.
• Build evaluation pipelines to prove usefulness of the system.
• Design for failure in agent loops: retries, model fallbacks, cost limits, human-in-the-loop.
• Capture domain expertise and repeatable workflows for reuse.
• Engage early with clients to shape use cases and assess feasibility.
• Work with SMEs and end-users through interviews, UAT and observing real workflows.

Skills

Python

Software engineering

English (C1)

RAG & retrieval

Observability & tracing

Cloud deployment

CI/CD

SME communication

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

Semantic Kernel

OpenAI

Anthropic

Google Gemini

Job description

EPAM Systems is seeking a senior engineer to design and ship AI-native systems end-to-end, including agents, workflows, RAG, and the harness. You will implement custom tool calling, sandboxing, and context engineering while ensuring observability and scale.

You will collaborate with SMEs and end-users to understand real value, build evaluation pipelines, and design for failure with retries and human-in-the-loop controls. A strong Python background and cloud deployment experience are essential.