Senior Director, Frontier AI Research, Bay Area, NY

EPAM's new Frontier AI business unit partners directly with leading AI labs and advanced AI organizations, translating their research and post-training objectives into technically rigorous, deliverable programs across evaluations, RL environments, and training data.

The Senior Director, Frontier AI Research is EPAM's first dedicated Frontier AI research hire, operating across a broad set of capabilities rather than a single research domain. The role sits at the intersection of research, solution architecture, and technical sales, remaining technically engaged through early pilots while delivery leadership owns day-to-day execution.

The right person is a genuine technical peer to sophisticated AI researchers: someone who can translate ambiguous research goals into concrete specifications that delivery teams can execute at quality and scale.

Req.#Responsibilities Engage directly with researchers, engineers, and technical leaders at frontier AI labs to understand model training, post-training, and evaluation objectives

Translate ambiguous research goals into explicit target capabilities, failure modes, and success criteria, advising customers and internal teams on the right technical approach

Design rigorous evaluation approaches, including task taxonomies, benchmarks, rubrics, and graders, and analyze model outputs to identify failure modes and improvement opportunities

Help architect RL environments, reward functions, and verifiers that provide reliable training and evaluation signals while mitigating reward hacking and weak verification

Design technically rigorous training data programs (SFT, preference data, RLHF), defining task distributions, annotation criteria, and quality standards

Translate recurring customer research needs into repeatable EPAM Frontier AI offerings, methodologies, and technical assets

Partner with the Platform and Operations Lead to determine the tooling, infrastructure, and specialist talent required to deliver new offerings

Serve as the primary research and technical SME supporting Frontier AI Sellers in strategic customer pursuits, from discovery through solution design

Translate customer requirements into technically compelling solution designs, proposals, and pilot plans that establish credibility with sophisticated AI research organizations

Convert research requirements into clear specifications, including scope, rubrics, and quality thresholds, that delivery teams can execute without losing the research intent

Provide technical oversight during early and strategically important engagements, reviewing outputs and model behavior to confirm the program is producing the intended results

Maintain strong familiarity with developments in frontier model training, post-training, RL, agentic systems, and evaluation, and apply that knowledge to EPAM's offerings

Build relationships across the Frontier AI research ecosystem and contribute to technically credible customer facing content and thought leadership

Requirements

Significant experience in machine learning, AI research, or research engineering, with demonstrated work on modern deep learning and large language models

Strong understanding of the model training and post-training lifecycle, including SFT, RLHF, reward modeling, and evaluation

Demonstrated depth in one or more Frontier AI focus areas (evaluations, RL environments, agentic systems, reward or verifier design, coding agents), with the breadth to operate across adjacent areas

Experience translating ambiguous research objectives into structured experiments, datasets, evaluations, or environments

Hands-on technical capability, including strong Python skills and experience with modern ML frameworks, LLM APIs, and evaluation tooling

Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and cross-functional audiences

Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated research experience

Nice to have

Peer-reviewed AI/ML research or a strong record of technically substantive applied research

Prior experience building solutions or conducting research for frontier AI labs or leading foundation model companies

Direct experience with RLHF, RLAIF, preference optimization, or synthetic data generation and curation

Comfortable operating as a genuine technical peer to sophisticated researchers, with the commercial awareness to translate research credibility into customer trust

Entrepreneurial mindset, comfortable building a…