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Forward Deployed Engineer/Chief Role

Role overview

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of engineering experience building production AI / LLM applications
  • Expert-level Python and solid software engineering fundamentals
  • Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks and major LLM providers
  • Strong judgment under ambiguity

Responsibilities

  • Design, build and ship AI-native systems E2E
  • Build evaluation pipelines and help prove system usability
  • Capture domain expertise and repeatable workflows
  • Write production-grade Python for integrations and deployment

Key facts

Hard skills

Other skills

  • Communication
  • Teamwork
  • Dealing With Ambiguity

About the company

EPAM Systems logo

EPAM Systems

  • IT Services & Consulting
  • XLarge
  • 10,001+
Since 1993, EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM) has used its software engineering expertise to become a leading global provider of digital engineering, cloud and AI-enabled transformation services, and a leading business and experience consulting partner for global enterprises and ambitious startups. We address our clients’ transformation challenges by fusing EPAM Continuum’s integrated strategy, experience and technology consulting with our 30+ years of engineering execution to speed our clients’ time to market and drive greater value from their innovations and digital investments. We make GenAI real with our AI LLM orchestration, testing and engineering solutions, EPAM DIAL, EPAM EliteA™ and EPAM AI/RUN™, respectively. We deliver globally, but engage locally with our expert teams of consultants, architects, designers and engineers, making the future real for our clients, our partners and our people around the world. We believe the right solutions are the ones that improve people’s lives and fuel competitive advantage for our clients across diverse industries. Our thinking comes to life in the experiences, products and platforms we design and bring to market. Added to the S&P 500 and the Forbes Global 2000 in 2021 and recognized by Glassdoor and Newsweek as a Top 100 Best Workplace, our multidisciplinary teams serve customers across six continents. We are proud to be among the top 15 companies in Information Technology Services in the Fortune 1000 and to be recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketScapes for Worldwide Experience Build Services, Worldwide Experience Design Services and Worldwide Software Engineering Services. Learn more at www.epam.com.

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Job description

We are building AI-native solutions for our clients — products where LLM and its harness are the core of the value. This is a builder's role: you and your team are responsible for building agentic systems, writing the production code, and standing up the evals and observability. You will work closely with SMEs and end-users to understand where the real value lies, and you design the feedback loops. 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, compaction Build the evaluation pipelines and use them to prove the system is genuinely useful Design for failure in the agent loop: retries, model fallbacks, cost limits and human-in-the-loop on consequential actions Capture domain expertise and repeatable workflows so what works on one engagement carries to the next Engage early to help shape the use case and check technical feasibility Write production-grade Python: integrations, APIs, data access, deployment Work directly with SMEs and end-users through interviews, UAT and observing the real workflow, and validate that the system fits how people actually work Requirements 7+ years of engineering experience, with a strong recent track record building production AI / LLM applications (not prototypes or research only) Strong agent-design judgment — task-harness fit, matching the harness to the context, failures and policies of the actual task rather than calling a model in a loop Capability to operate close to the client: lead discovery and feasibility conversations, work directly with SMEs and end-users, and explain technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel) and major LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini) Expert-level Python and solid software engineering fundamentals Strong RAG and retrieval skills: vector databases, embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, chunking and context management Proven experience evaluating generative AI quality — LLM-based evaluation, heuristics, custom eval frameworks — and using observability/tracing tools (LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, Langfuse) Production deployment experience on at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) with containerization, CI/CD Sound judgment under ambiguity — scoping, sequencing and making the call on speed vs. quality vs. scope English at C1 level Nice to have Experience designing experiments, A/B testing and iterating on AI products against real user behavior and business metrics Background in NLP, Data Science or applied ML, with experience moving models into production Familiarity with MCP, A2A and Agent Skills, and emerging agent standards Experience with enterprise AI platforms (AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Databricks Genie, Microsoft Foundry) Exposure to AI governance, security and compliance (guardrails, prompt-injection prevention)

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