Advanced Software Engineer Career Path for Top Technologists

The EPAM Advanced Software Engineering career path was announced in 2019 to recognize experienced technologists with 10 or more years of industry experience who wanted to focus on their engineering careers before advancing to the CTO role.

“Technology has changed for as long as I've been working with it. Advanced engineering as a concept seems to be the next logical step in the evolution of EPAM’s engineering DNA. Until recently, our engineers did not have a managerial career track, and now they do. And that makes me very happy.”

Pavel Veller, VP, Chief Technologist, EPAM 

Why didn’t we have Advanced Engineers before?

We've always had Advanced Engineers, we just needed a proper name for the role and its function. Previously, an entire team, a single Chief Engineer, or sometimes a Solution Architect played the advanced engineer role. That person might have been both a developer and an architect.

There are many Chief Engineers and Solution Architects who act as informal Advanced Engineers. In the past, they were pigeonholed into the job and had no path to growth. With the role of Advanced Engineer, their skills and knowledge can be recognized, and growth opportunities can be made available to them. Formalizing the function into a separate career track also makes it easier to find qualified candidates.

What does an Advanced Engineer do?

Advanced Software Engineers (ASE) analyze the client’s business goals, study a product's requirements and make decisions regarding the overall technical and design strategy. 

Advanced Engineers need to have extensive cross-stack development experience across a host of different domains and a variety of programming languages. They analyze requests, create detailed technical designs and turn those designs into simple prototypes to demonstrate feasibility.

Advanced Engineers participate in presales, consult clients and conduct audits of the code of existing technology solutions to evaluate its effectiveness. They're also expected to promote High Engineering Culture proactively, incorporate emerging technology, share their best engineering practices, enhance EPAM’s image for our clients and be a role model for our engineers. 

“Just keep solving technical problems with beautiful, correct, fast, maintainable, readable code — and enjoy the process.”

Pavel Veller, VP, Chief Technologist, EPAM  

What qualities should Advanced Engineers have?

The top five characteristics of an Advanced Engineer:

• A technologist at heart with hands-on expertise and a comprehensive technical knowledge of engineering and systems of different levels of complexity, as well as various cutting-edge technologies in different domains.
• Has strong problem-solving skills with a focus on results.
• Has systems engineering skills (to enable the realization of successful systems) and systems thinking skills (to decompose existing systems and recompose them in new ways with new approaches and technologies).
• Is recognized as a top talent in the technical domain at a company, industry and global level.
• Is eager for ongoing learning and sharing expertise through training, mentoring, community outreach and more.

What is the difference between a Solution Architect and an Advanced Engineer?

The answer to that question lies in focusing on what an engineer does and wants to do in their future career: client-facing solution consulting and architecture vs. day-to-day, hands-on, expert-level problem-solving. The start of an Advanced Engineer and Solution Architect (SA) career track may look similar, and a strong technologist can likely play either role. As these professionals progress through their careers, however, the differences become more evident:

• An SA focuses on identifying the most suitable technological solution for the business's needs and has a comprehensive vision of the necessary technology. The SA is on the business side and helps explain technical IT concepts in a way that makes sense and is easy to digest. They can gently guide clients toward the optimal solution that suits their needs, regardless of complexity.
• An ASE focuses more on the technical side of solutions by creating detailed designs and implementations. As a deep technical expert with day-to-day hands-on practice, the ASE can validate high-level architecture applicability and communicate with corresponding experts from the client’s side.

What is the difference between a Lead Engineer and an Advanced Engineer?

This question concerns how an engineer works and wants to work in the future:

• A Lead Engineer focuses on the application level or a subsystem of a larger system and generally implements the solution components.
• An ASE can handle complex engineering problems, including many components, large data volumes and high loads. This includes technical design and the ability to implement and troubleshoot any specific system component.

Who can become an Advanced Engineer?

Any software engineer who wants to keep doing engineering in practice can become an Advanced Engineer in the future.

As for who is ready to become an Advanced Engineer in the near term, this person is usually a very experienced Lead Engineer with extensive practice in developing complex systems.

Solution Architects (who often play the ASE role on the project) may also switch their career path to Advanced Software Engineering. This change makes sense for SAs who feel more suited to a technical path than a client-facing business role.

If you are interested in joining our team at EPAM, check out our current openings at epam.com/careers.