Data & AI Reliability Engineering Consultant/Architect

About the Position

We are seeking Data & AI Reliability Engineering Consultants and Architects to drive client-facing discovery, presales, and advisory engagements focused on the reliability of data platforms and AI systems. This is a consulting role: the individual leads client conversations, shapes both the solution and the proposal, and then guides the engineering team through delivery. The consultant works across three connected domains: observability and SRE practice, data platform reliability (pipelines, quality, lineage, cost), and AI/LLM system reliability (evaluation, telemetry, guardrails).

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical side of presales: qualify requests, facilitate client workshops, define scope, assumptions, and estimates
• Conduct discovery and maturity assessments of a client's observability, data reliability, and AI operations; deliver findings and a prioritized roadmap
• Author the solution section of proposals and RFP responses; present and defend it to client technical and business stakeholders
• Design target architectures for observability and reliability of data platforms and AI/LLM workloads, including tool selection and migration paths
• Establish SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for data products and AI services; translate them into alerting, incident, and governance processes
• Build the business case: cost of incidents, tooling cost optimization, expected outcomes of the change
• Serve as the trusted advisor for client engineering leads, SDMs, and directors throughout the engagement
• Lead the first phase of delivery after a won deal, then transition to the engineering team while remaining accountable for the solution
• Review engineers' work, set technical standards (alert-as-code, dashboards-as-code, IaC), and unblock decisions
• Convert project experience into reusable assets: offerings, accelerators, assessment frameworks, reference architectures
• Mentor engineers moving towards consulting; participate in technical interviews
• Represent Data & AI externally through talks, articles, and vendor partnerships

Requirements

• 7+ years in engineering, including 2+ years in a client-facing role: consultant, solution architect, presales engineer, or technical lead with direct client ownership
• Proven presales track record: leading discovery or assessment workshops, producing estimates and proposals, presenting to senior stakeholders
• Capability to structure an ambiguous client problem into scope, options, trade-offs, and a recommendation, both in writing and live
• English B2+ with confident spoken delivery; able to run a workshop and handle objections unsupported
• Hands-on background in at least one enterprise observability platform: New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana stack, or Elastic
• Knowledge of OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, and log pipelines; alert design, event correlation, and noise reduction
• Expertise in SRE practice in production: SLO/SLI, error budgets, incident management, postmortems
• Proficiency in Cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform, or other IaC; Python or similar for automation
• Understanding of how modern data platforms work and fail: Databricks, Snowflake, or a cloud-native equivalent; orchestration (Airflow or similar); batch and streaming
• Competency in data reliability practice: data quality checks, freshness and volume monitoring, lineage, pipeline SLAs, cost observability
• Working understanding of LLM application architecture (RAG, agents, model gateways) and what must be measured: quality evaluation, latency, token cost, drift, guardrails
• Background in instrumenting or operating at least one AI/ML workload in production, or designing such a solution for a client
• Self-driven and dependable on commitments: owns deadlines for proposals and client deliverables without supervision
• Comfort switching between several presales and one delivery engagement
• Flexibility to use AI assistants in daily engineering and documentation work

Nice to Have

• Vendor certifications: New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace; Databricks or Snowflake; cloud architect level (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Familiarity with data observability tooling: Monte Carlo, Soda, Great Expectations, Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring, Unity Catalog
• Skills in LLM observability and evaluation tooling: Langfuse, LangSmith, Arize, MLflow, OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions
• Qualifications in AIOps and ITSM integration: ServiceNow, PagerDuty, event correlation engines
• Proficiency in FinOps for observability and data platforms; license and ingestion cost optimization
• Knowledge of AI security and governance fundamentals: guardrails, red teaming, data masking
• Expertise in retail, finance, or manufacturing domains
• Public profile, including conference talks, articles, community leadership

We Offer

• 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)

• Focus on your professional growth:

  • 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)

• 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