Senior Technical Manager with Solution Architect Skills (AI & Data Platform)

EPAM is looking for a Senior Technical Manager with Solution Architect skills to join a major financial services client in Zurich. The client's central IT organisation is building a shared AI platform layer on its existing Microsoft Azure estate. In this embedded role you will lead the evaluation, engineering and operationalisation of that platform. The platform is built primarily on cloud-native services with open-source or open-core components where needed, delivered by a small platform engineering team. The engagement is time- and budget-boxed with potential for further building blocks to follow. This is a hands-on delivery leadership position - not a project administrator and not a hands-on coder - requiring the technical depth to evaluate architecture decisions and defend a position on the build approach, combined with the delivery capability to translate that into a structured plan and run the resulting services after go-live. Responsibilities Own end-to-end delivery across architecture, engineering, security and operations Translate the target architecture into an executable roadmap: work packages, milestones and dependencies Lead product and technology evaluations and proofs of concept - for example a native cloud AI gateway vs an open-source gateway such as LiteLLM vs a dedicated product - and drive each decision with clear documented criteria Plan and steer the work of a small platform engineering team; coordinate architects, security, operations and vendors, most of whom will not report directly to you Establish production-ready managed services on Azure, including operational processes, controls and service ownership Drive the transition into operations and own the service after go-live: operating model, support model, SLAs and SLOs, monitoring, DevOps, FinOps and AIOps Manage stakeholders, vendors, risks, budget and delivery reporting in a regulated environment Requirements Experience in building shared platform services, taking them to production and operating them after go-live Ability to explain and defend build-vs-buy and native-vs-open-source decisions, and to articulate how to construct such a platform and the service around it Experience in leading evaluations or PoCs with agreed criteria and documented decisions Ability to plan the work of a small platform engineering team covering structure, skills and the choice between upfront work packages and iterative delivery Hands-on ownership skills of the operating model, support model, SLAs, monitoring, DevOps and FinOps Knowledge of cloud platform engineering, DevOps/SRE, security, observability and IT service management Recent and concrete knowledge of AI gateways, model access and lifecycle, evaluations, AI observability and guardrails Microsoft Azure platform delivery experience; AWS or Google Cloud is acceptable with a demonstrated ability to transfer concepts to Azure is a preference Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry is preferred Fluent English language knowledge Nice to have Hands-on AI platform experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure API Management AI gateway features, LiteLLM or a comparable AI gateway in production is a strong advantage A project management certification: IPMA, PRINCE2, PMP or equivalent Experience with AI-native software delivery, for example using AI coding agents such as Claude Code German language skills