Lead AI Engineer

EPAM SYSTEMS TURKEY YAZILIM GELİŞTİRME LİMİTED ŞİRKETİ

We are looking for a skilled, innovation-driven Lead AI Engineer to join our team and spearhead the development of cutting-edge Generative AI solutions. If you're passionate about artificial intelligence and adept at building systems that deliver measurable business impact, this opportunity is ideal for you. You will work with a dynamic group of professionals to create and deploy AI-driven technologies that tackle real-world challenges — all within a highly collaborative, supportive, and forward-focused environment.

As a technical leader, you won't just write code; you will shape our AI technical roadmap, architect complex enterprise-grade systems, act as a trusted advisor to our clients, and mentor and grow a high-performing engineering team. If you love Python, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and driving innovation at the intersection of AI strategy and software craftsmanship, we want to hear from you!

• Drive technical vision and architecture by leading the design and implementation of highly scalable, robust enterprise AI applications, including complex multi-agent workflows, custom search engines, and end-to-end AI systems.
• Partner closely with clients and business stakeholders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and recommend high-impact, feasible LLM-driven solutions.
• Establish engineering standards by setting the benchmark for code quality, architectural patterns, robust data pipelines, smart prompt management, and automated evaluation frameworks.
• Foster a culture of learning and high performance through design reviews, development best practices, and active mentorship of junior and senior developers.
• Direct R&D and innovation by guiding research on emerging models, framing prototyping strategies (PoCs), and standardizing the tools and frameworks used to stay on the bleeding edge of Generative AI.

• 5+ years of experience in a Lead, Principal, or Senior AI/Software Engineering role, with a track record of architecting and shipping complex, production-grade AI or ML-based solutions.
• At least 1 year of relevant leadership experience.
• Master-level proficiency in Python (specifically FastAPI or equivalent web frameworks) and a strong foundation in core NLP concepts (semantic similarity, tokenization, NER, text classification).
• Expertise in modern Generative AI design patterns, particularly RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), autonomous multi-agent networks, and tool integration.
• Production experience with major LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Gemini) and framework orchestration tools such as LangGraph or LlamaIndex.
• Background in optimizing AI applications for performance, security (prompt injection mitigation, data privacy), cloud costs, and system evaluation using programmatic or LLM-as-a-judge approaches.
• Capability to quickly direct and build intuitive UI/UX prototypes using Streamlit, Gradio, or equivalent.
• Outstanding leadership and communication skills to lead engineering discussions, bridge the gap between technical and non-technical audiences, and present technical architectures to executives and clients.
• Strong English communication skills (B2 level or higher).

• Full-stack capabilities with TypeScript.
• Experience incorporating AI into the SDLC to boost team efficiency using tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or specialized agents for automation.
• Cloud architecture expertise in AWS or Azure (specifically Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or cloud-native containerized deployments).
• Familiarity with Databricks (MLflow, Agent Bricks, Unity Catalog) for orchestrating data pipelines and model lifecycles.
• Knowledge of advanced search/retrieval systems (hybrid search, vector databases, custom rerankers and ranking algorithms).
• Familiarity with emerging open-source protocols (like Model Context Protocol - MCP) and LLM monitoring tools (like LangSmith or Arize Phoenix).