Innovation Engineer

Job Title: Innovation Engineer

Location: Flexible (Peterborough, Sunderland, Kent, Bristol) ad hoc travel

Role Overview

The Innovation Engineer plays a key role within the Group’s Innovation function, helping to shape and deliver the Technology Innovation and GenAI roadmap. This role blends hands-on engineering with strategic exploration, focusing on the practical application of emerging technologies — particularly Generative AI — to solve real business challenges. As part of a multidisciplinary team, the Innovation Engineer will lead the design, prototyping, and early-stage development of innovative solutions, helping to inform and influence the Group’s future technology direction.

Key Responsibilities:

• Explore and evaluate emerging technologies to identify opportunities for innovation and business impact.
• Design and deliver a pipeline of proofs of concept (PoCs) and early-stage projects aligned with the Innovation strategy.
• Act as a technical SME for our Reference Architecture, defining the evolution and optimisation of this platform
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, architects, data SMEs, and delivery teams to shape priorities and approaches.
• Build and test prototypes, ensuring they are scalable and production-ready where appropriate.
• Lead infrastructure and environment setup for innovation projects, including CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments.
• Support the development of data pipelines, processing, and storage for AI/ML workloads.
• Monitor and evaluate model performance, accuracy, and resource utilisation.
• Champion delivery best practices across the team including AI Governance, EDA alignment and SDLC compliance
• Contribute to the rollout of successful innovations across wider business functions and applications.
• Support the development of AI literacy across the Group, coaching stakeholders and co-developing new ways of working.
• Stay current with technology trends and GenAI developments, bringing fresh thinking and insight to the team.
• Drive knowledge sharing across the team including lessons learnt in PoCs, platform specialisms, and providing guidance, mentorship, and coaching to junior team members

Key Skills and Experience:

• Proven experience in an engineering role, with a track record of delivering innovative technology solutions.
• Strong programming skills in Python, C#, or similar languages.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
• Understanding of data engineering principles, including ETL, data pipelines, and database management.
• Working knowledge of ML/AI concepts and technologies, including model deployment and monitoring.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work across disciplines in a fast-paced, exploratory environment.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable

• Experience working in innovation, R&D, or emerging technology teams.
• Passion for GenAI and a strong understanding of its potential impact on business and technology.
• Experience in regulated industries such as insurance or financial services.
• Experience with tools such as LangChain, Databricks, LLMOps, and Kubernetes.

Behaviours:

• Team player
• Self-motivated with a drive to learn and develop
• Logical thinker with a professional and positive attitude
• Passion to innovate and improve processes
• Personality and a sense of humour