Senior Solution Architect

About the role

Enterprises are past the point of asking whether AI belongs in their systems. The question now is which AI capabilities should exist, how much autonomy each one earns, how they integrate with systems of record and real business processes, and how anyone will know they are working. Answering those questions well - and writing the answers down so that engineering teams and coding agents can build against them - is the AI Architect's job. You will design the target architecture of AI-native applications, Enterprise AI and Applied AI solutions for large clients across industries, from assistants and RAG systems to agents, agentic workflows and autonomous components. You will decide what the system should do and, just as importantly, what it should not. You will define the evaluations, guardrails, and constraints that shape what gets built, whether the builder is an engineer or an AI coding agent. This is an architecture role. The output is decisions, structure, and the reasoning behind them - not code volume. You will still prototype when a decision needs evidence, but most of your time goes to framing problems, resolving conflicting requirements, making trade-offs explicit, and getting the right people to own them. You will work within EPAM delivery teams and in presales: shape proposals, present options and costs to client executives, and review designs across teams. Build proofs of concept and reference implementations when, and only when, a decision needs evidence or a team needs an example of "good". Contribute to EPAM's AI architecture practice: reference architectures, reusable patterns, and mentoring architects who are transitioning into AI-native design. Note: This remote position cannot be performed in New York City.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end architectures for AI-native solutions: orchestration, retrieval, tool and system integration, agent autonomy and guardrails, identity and authorization, evaluation, observability, and cost model
• Fit each solution exactly to the business scope - no more, no less - and be able to explain what you deliberately left out and why
• Turn incoherent or contradictory requirements into explicit business decisions: surface them, reframe them in business terms, price the options, and get a named owner to decide
• Make and document architectural trade-offs (build vs buy, model selection, retrieval strategy, autonomy level, cost vs quality) in a form that stakeholders can challenge and future teams can trust
• Define the evaluation strategy for each system: how we will know that an assistant or agent fits the business scope, not just that it produces fluent output
• Author the constraints, guidelines, and architectural fitness functions that engineering teams and coding agents build within, and revise them as the organization learns what generation gets wrong
• Decide where humans must stay in the loop - regulated decisions, data of record, security boundaries, anything with legal or contractual consequence
• Work within EPAM delivery teams and in presales: shape proposals, present options and costs to client executives, and review designs across teams
• Build proofs of concept and reference implementations when, and only when, a decision needs evidence or a team needs an example of "good"
• Contribute to EPAM's AI architecture practice: reference architectures, reusable patterns, and mentoring architects who are transitioning into AI-native design

Requirements

• You have architected AI-native