Lead Data & AI Engineer

EPAM SystemsMelbourneOn-siteFull-time29 Sept 2026

EPAM is seeking a Lead Data & AI Engineer in Melbourne to design and deliver data platforms and AI-enabled applications across client engagements. The role combines hands-on data engineering, technical leadership, and practical AI experience, requiring strong Python and SQL skills plus expertise in distributed processing and cloud platforms.

What you'll do

Lead the design and development of scalable data pipelines, platforms, and data products
Build batch and streaming solutions for ingestion, transformation, and delivery
Use AI coding assistants effectively in daily work to accelerate development, testing, debugging, and documentation, while reviewing and validating their output
Apply software engineering practices, including testing, code review, CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure automation
Design for data quality, security, governance, reliability, and performance
Contribute to AI applications, including data preparation, retrieval, integration, evaluation, and deployment
Help design and build agentic applications that use tools, APIs, and enterprise data to support business workflows
Make sound architectural choices across cloud services, processing frameworks, storage technologies, and orchestration tools
Work with clients and stakeholders to clarify requirements, explain trade-offs, and guide delivery
Mentor engineers and contribute to reusable patterns and engineering standards

What you need

Must-have

PythonSQLApache SparkAzureAWSGoogle CloudData pipelinesLakehouse architecture

Nice-to-have

DatabricksSnowflakeMicrosoft FabricBigQueryUnity CatalogTerraformApache KafkaLangChain

Soft skills

CommunicationTechnical leadershipMentoringStakeholder managementProblem solving

Data EngineeringAILeadPythonSQLCloudMelbourneFull-timeOn-siteEPAM

/What you'll do

/What you need

Must-have

Nice-to-have

Soft skills

What you'll do

What you need