Lead Full Stack - AI Engineer

About the Position

We are seeking a Lead Full Stack AI Engineer to join our team with eventual relocation to Qatar. EPAM is renowned for delivering cutting-edge technological solutions to transform businesses worldwide. This is an on-site position in Qatar, requiring 3 days per week to be worked at the client's office, and the rest to be worked from anywhere in Qatar. Please only apply if you are willing to relocate to Qatar (and you are eligible). Relocation is supported by the project.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to pragmatic AI architectures (RAG/agents/copilots/automation) integrated into cloud-native microservices and enterprise data platforms
• Support decisions on when to use RAG vs agents vs conventional approaches
• Implement and apply spec-driven development (SDD) specs/templates and support governance/quality gates
• Embed SDD into delivery workflows
• Build and maintain agentic use cases, including the ability to run/write agents and implement guardrails defined by the program
• Deliver production solutions (LLM integrations, retrieval, embeddings/vector stores where relevant) embedded into Java/Spring Boot services
• Implement observability, rollout/versioning, and CI/CD for prompts/specs/models
• Deploy and operate solutions on AKS and Azure hosting with guidance from platform/SRE teams
• Contribute to tracking adoption/productivity/quality and risk KPIs for AI-enabled delivery
• Participate in playbooks, training, documentation, and team mentoring, and share patterns and examples across squads
• Implement responsible AI controls, data handling constraints, and agent guardrails in line with the client's policies and engineering standards

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on development experience in Core Java, Spring/Spring Boot, web services, and microservices
• Understanding of cloud-native architecture, database concepts (Oracle/PL/SQL preferred), Kafka, and GitLab
• 1-2+ years of hands-on delivery exposure to LLMs, RAG, and agentic systems (production or strong pilot/enterprise PoC experience)
• Understanding of AI concepts, especially Spec Driven Development (SDD), including working knowledge of running and writing agents and implementing guardrails
• Experience with LLM providers and/or self-hosted models, prompt engineering, and an evaluation/testing mindset
• Familiarity with Azure, including AKS and/or Azure Web Apps, and CI/CD with GitLab (Azure DevOps a plus)
• Strong communication skills and ability to work in a global team
• Practical experience applying SDD (spec-driven ways of working) in a team setting
• Hands-on experience building and integrating agentic and/or RAG capabilities into real engineering workflows
• Ability to balance cost, productivity, quality, and risk when implementing LLM/agentic solutions
• Production mindset, including testing, observability, safe rollout, and secure-by-design implementation

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of React

We Offer

• Private healthcare and life insurance
• End of service gratuity
• Annual air travel tickets for expatriates
• Corporate Programs including Employee Referral Program with rewards
• Learning and development opportunities including in-house training and coaching, professional certifications, and courses

All benefits and perks are subject to certain eligibility requirements