EPAM Systems, Inc. Hiring! Full Time Applied AI Engineer in Federal Territory - Ricebowl

You will build the AI systems our customers actually use. That means writing the prompts, designing the agent loops, tuning the retrieval pipelines, building the evaluations, and getting all of it into production with the latency, cost, and reliability our customers need.

This is a craft role. We are not looking for someone who has read the papers. We are looking for someone who has shipped — and who knows the specific ways AI systems fail in production, because they have fixed those failures themselves.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade AI features: retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, structured extraction, classification, summarisation, conversational interfaces
• Build the evaluation systems that prove whether your work is actually working — golden datasets, regression suites, online metrics, human-in-the-loop review
• Make the unglamorous decisions that determine whether a system survives contact with real users: prompt versioning, fallback behaviour, rate-limit handling, cost controls, observability
• Integrate AI capabilities into customer systems — APIs, queues, databases, identity, audit trails. Modern AI work is 30% modelling and 70% engineering, and you are comfortable in both
• Pair closely with our Solution Architects on shaping. When the design will not work, you say so early
• Contribute to the team's shared craft: code review, internal write-ups, brown-bags on what you have learned shipping the last system

Requirements

• Several years of professional software engineering, plus meaningful production experience with modern AI systems (LLMs, RAG, agents, evaluation tooling). The specific years matter less than the depth — show us what you have shipped
• Fluency in at least one of: Python, TypeScript / Node, Go
• Comfort with the modern AI engineering stack: at least one major model provider's SDK, a vector database, an evaluation framework, an orchestration library, and the observability tools you use to know whether your system is healthy
• Real experience with evaluation. You can talk for an hour about how you knew your system was getting better — not just that it felt better
• Pragmatism about model choice. You pick the smallest, cheapest, most reliable model that does the job, and you can defend the choice
• Honesty about what AI can and cannot do. You have walked away from a feature when the technology was not ready

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning or post-training open-weight models
• Background in distributed systems, low-latency serving, or ML infrastructure
• Open-source contributions to AI tooling
• Domain depth in one of [financial services, healthcare, public sector, industrial, retail]

We offer

• By choosing EPAM, you're getting a job at one of the most loved workplaces according to Newsweek 2021 & 2022&2023.
• Employee ideas are the main driver of our business. We have a very supportive environment where your voice matters
• You will be challenged while working side-by-side with the best talent globally. We work with top-notch technologies, constantly seeking new industry trends and best practices
• We offer a transparent career path and an individual roadmap to engineer your future & accelerate your journey
• At EPAM, you can find vast opportunities for self-development: online courses and libraries, mentoring programs, partial grants of certification, and experience exchange with colleagues around the world. You will learn, contribute, and grow with us

Life at EPAM

• EPAM is a leader in the fastest-growing segment (product development/digital platform engineering) of the IT industry. We acquired Just-BI in 2021 to reinforce our leading position as a global Business Intelligence services provider and have been growing rapidly. With a talented multinational team, we provide data and analytics expertise
• We are currently involved in end-to-end BI design and implementation projects in major national and international companies. We are proud of our entrepreneurial start-up culture and are focused on investing in people by creating continuous learning and development opportunities for our employees who deliver engineering excellence for our clients