Lead AI-Native Engineer

We are seeking a Lead AI-Native Engineer to raise a team's or customer's AI maturity and prove it with numbers. This role designs and ships AI systems, with success measured by what changed for others: engineers who now maintain their own skills, a customer team that moved from pilot to production, and adoption and quality metrics that improved because of how the work was introduced.

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

Requirements

• 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

Nice to have

• Background in reusable patterns adopted by other squads or engagements, and multi-agent topologies designed and run in production, with observability (token spend, hallucination rate, false-positive ratio, retry counts)
• Experience in governance and compliance for AI (guardrail policies, approval flows, audit trails)
• Familiarity with pre-sales or client-facing work
• Understanding of autonomous delivery pipelines, with concrete next steps
• Showcase of conference talks, internal courses or written guidance on AI adoption

We offer

With us you can:

• Work on a flexible schedule remotely or from any of our comfortable offices or coworking spaces in Ukraine
• Receive the necessary equipment to perform your work tasks
• Change projects and technology stacks within EPAM
• Gain experience in various business domains (Insurance, E-commerce, Healthcare, Finance, Travelling, Media, Artificial Intelligence, and more)
• Relocation opportunities may be available for eligible candidates, depending on the role and openings at other EPAM locations
• Participate in volunteer, charity programs and communities (both technical and interest-based)

We focus on your professional growth:

• You can plan your individual career path together with your manager
• Receive regular feedback from colleagues
• Improve your English for free with certified teachers (Speaking Clubs, client interview preparation courses, etc.)
• Get the opportunity to undergo free training and certification in AWS, GCP, or Azure Clouds
• Use the internal E-learn training program (18,200+ specialized training and mentoring programs)
• Access corporate accounts on LinkedIn Learning, Get Abstract and other partner resources
• Study at EPAM Solution Architecture School with the instructors who are practicing architects
• Develop as a leader, join Delivery Management, Resource Management, Leadership Essentials school and more
• Participate in internal communities (500+ meetups, technical discussions, brainstorming sessions, online events and conferences annually)

What we offer:

• Vacation and sick leave (including a sick leave without a medical certificate)
• A wide range of Voluntary Medical Insurance programs providing both medical treatment and various preventive options (including sports activities)
• Medical insurance for family members at corporate rates
• Company support during significant life events (childbirth or adoption, marriage, etc.)
• Support for psychological comfort: discounts on services from mental health specialists or coaches, thematic training
• E-kids program - a free programming language training program for EPAMers' children

Kindly note that this role supports remote work, but only from within Ukraine.

Kindly be advised that the set of benefits, including learning, certification, and other opportunities, may vary depending on the role you apply for. Our recruiter will be able to share more details about the specific opportunity during your general interview.

EPAM strives to provide its global team of over 62,350 professionals in more than 55 countries with opportunities for professional growth from day one of collaboration. Our colleagues are the source of EPAM's success, so we value cooperation, strive to always understand our clients' business and aim for the highest quality standards. No matter where you are, you will join a dedicated, diverse community that will help you realize your potential to the fullest.

Remote in Ukraine: Lviv