Chief Forward Deployed Engineer

EPAM builds 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 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 — interviews, UAT, 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
• The ability 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, or similar) 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, or similar)
• Production deployment experience on at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or 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, Agent Skills, and emerging agent standards
• Experience with enterprise AI platforms (AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Databricks Genie, Microsoft Foundry, Gemini Enterprise)
• Exposure to AI governance, security, and compliance (guardrails, prompt-injection prevention)
• Prior client-facing or pre-sales exposure in a consulting or services context

Benefits

• Opportunity to work in a fast-paced, agile, software engineering culture
• Comfortable modern office in Prague 7, with support of hybrid or fully remote mode
• Benefit program (5 weeks of vacation, paid sick days, paid days off for special occasions, meal vouchers, flexi pass, Prague city public transport annual coupon, multisport cards, optional contribution to pension fund, health insurance for family member)
• EPAM Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) (subject to certain eligibility requirements)
• English language courses
• Czech language courses upon request
• Referral bonuses for recommended candidates
• Mobile Phone Tariff’s program for managerial-level candidates
• Great learning and development opportunities, including in-house professional training, career advisory and coaching, sponsored professional certifications, well-being programs, LinkedIn Learning Solutions and much more

• Opportunity to work in a fast-paced, agile, software engineering culture
• Benefit program (5 weeks of vacation, 5 paid sick days, meal vouchers, cafeteria and recreation bonuses, reimbursement of glasses, contribution to pension fund)
• Referral bonuses for recommended candidates
• English language courses
• Great learning and development opportunities, including in-house professional training, career advisory and coaching, sponsored professional certifications, well-being programs, LinkedIn Learning Solutions and much more