Principal AI Solution Engineer

We are seeking a Principal AI Solution Engineer to join an engineering organization building a sovereign, multi-tenant agentic AI platform, along with the applied products on top of it. Everything ships under strict data residency constraints and operates in both Arabic and English. Squads are small — three senior engineers — and decisions are made in the room. You will work across three layers and need to be credible in all of them: applied AI, AI infrastructure, and the backend platform.

Unlock the potential of remote work in Kazakhstan, giving you the flexibility to work from home or access our offices in Astana, Almaty or Karaganda. Responsibilities

• Set architecture for systems that span squads; write the decision down and defend it
• Build and tune GPU-based serving — vLLM, TGI or TensorRT-LLM — for latency, throughput and a cost per token you can justify
• Own the reference RAG and agent architecture other teams build against
• Define service boundaries, API contracts, event-driven infrastructure and the SLO work that prevents incidents rather than answering them
• Develop offline and online evaluation and regression detection, so models, prompts and retrieval can change without flying blind

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience with shipped production systems spanning applied AI, AI infrastructure and backend platforms
• At least 1 year of relevant leadership experience
• Expertise in Python and its production ecosystem, including FastAPI, Pydantic and asyncio
• Proficiency in production RAG end-to-end: ingestion, vector search, reranking and grounding evaluation
• Background in agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, OpenAI Agent SDK or Microsoft Agent Framework
• Competency in distributed systems, including idempotency, back-pressure and retry semantics, with strong event-driven architecture skills
• Knowledge of PostgreSQL at scale, along with GPU inference and serving using vLLM, TGI or TensorRT-LLM
• Familiarity with Kubernetes on Azure
• Skills in at least one infrastructure language: Go, Rust, Java or Kotlin
• Capability to use agentic coding tooling as a daily workflow, including project setup with CLAUDE.md, skills and agent configuration
• Excellent command of written and spoken English (B2+ level)

Nice to have

• Showcase of pgvector or Qdrant at production scale
• Experience with Arabic-language, voice or conversational AI
• Background in AI or mission-critical delivery in regulated environments such as government, defence or financial services
• Familiarity with Azure sovereign cloud, Entra ID and Azure OpenAI
• Understanding of Langfuse, Grafana, Prometheus and Terraform

We offer

• We connect like-minded people:

• Delivering innovative solutions to industry leaders, making a global impact

• Enjoyable working environment, whether it is the vibrant office or the comfort of your own home

• Opportunity to work abroad for up to two months per year

• Relocation opportunities within our offices in 55+ countries

• Corporate and social events

• We invest in your growth:

• Leadership development, career advising, soft skills and well-being programs

• Certifications, including GCP, Azure and AWS

• Unlimited access to EPAM's internal learning database

• Free English classes with certified teachers

• Discounts in local language schools, including online courses for the Kazakh language

• We cover it all:

• Participation in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Monetary bonuses for engaging in the referral program

• Medical & family care package

• Six trust days per year (sick leave without a medical certificate)

• Coverage of psychology sessions of your choice

• Benefits package (sports activities, a variety of stores and services)

• Housing support program: preferential mortgage access via Otbasy Bank partnership

EPAM is global leader in AI transformation engineering and integrated consulting, serving Forbes Global 2000 companies and ambitious startups. With over thirty years of expertise in custom software, product and platform engineering, we empower our clients to become AI-Native enterprises, driving measurable value from innovation and digital investments.