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.#1072890310

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