Job Advert
About the Role
We're building a dedicated R&D capability to explore emerging technologies, validate new approaches, and drive innovation across the business. This role is the technical heart of that effort.
As our Senior R&D Engineer, you'll take ideas and hypotheses and turn them into working prototypes that prove (or disprove) their viability. You'll work across a range of emerging technology areas; two current priorities are AI integration and business process automation/orchestration (sometimes called BOAT: Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies).
Your prototypes need to answer a question: does this approach work? When the answer is yes, you'll provide production-ready guidance to help other teams adopt and implement proven concepts. You're not just building demos; you're de-risking technical approaches and creating a bridge to operational delivery.
You'll work closely with our architecture team, contributing technical insights and recommendations that shape broader technology decisions. You'll also supervise our R&D Technical Analyst, guiding their hands-on development work and helping them grow their technical skills.
This is a role for someone who thrives on learning new technologies quickly, solving novel problems, and working at the boundary between research and engineering.
What You'll Do
Prototyping & Technical Exploration
* Run timeboxed evaluation cycles with explicit success/failure criteria and 'stop unless evidence' bias.
* Explore emerging technologies, platforms, and approaches; rapidly assess their practical viability
* Work across our priority R&D areas, including AI integration and business process automation/orchestration
* Make pragmatic technical trade-offs to prove concepts quickly without over-engineering
Production-Ready Guidance
* When prototypes prove successful, develop clear technical guidance for production implementation
* Createreference architecture, integration pattern, security-by-design notes, operational considerations, backlog-ready scope, and demo artefacts
* Provide security-by-design considerations within handover artefacts, including threat considerations, secure coding practices, recommended static/dynamic testing approaches, and integration with enterprise AppSec tooling.
* Support handover to development teams; ensure proven approaches can be adopted effectively
* Document technical decisions, trade-offs, and lessons learned for future reference
Architecture Collaboration
* Work closely with the architecture team to shape technical approaches for R&D initiatives. Architecture owns standards/guardrails; Senior R&D Engineer supplies empirical findings and recommends patterns discovered through prototyping.
* Contribute recommendations and insights based on hands-on prototyping experience
* Surface architectural implications discovered through exploration
* Act as a technical sparring partner for complex design questions
Team Leadership
* Supervise R&D Technical Analyst.Coach analyst on evaluation methods, code quality forPoCs, and documentation standards; run lightweight code reviews.
* Direct the analyst's prototyping contributions, code reviews, and technical learning
* Collaborate with the analyst on research activities;leveragetheir vendor scanning and documentation work
* Foster a culture of curiosity, rigour, and knowledge sharing within the R&D function
Infrastructure & Tooling
* Define minimal viable R&D sandbox requirements
* Partner with the platform team to for safe R&D environments and proof-of-concept deployments
* Define technical requirements for prototype hosting, testing, and demonstration
* Ensure experiments are reproducible.
Non-Responsibilities
* Feature delivery
* BAU stability
* Acting as a sprint delivery resource
* Product roadmap ownership
What You'll Bring
Essential
* Strong software engineering background with demonstrable experience building robust, working systems
* Solid understanding of process automation and orchestration concepts: workflow engines, BPMN, event-driven architectures, and how organisations automate complex business processes
* Solid understanding of AI/ML concepts: large language models, AI APIs, practicalapplicationsand limitations, and how AI capabilities can be integrated into applications
* Experience building AI-integrated applications; working with LLMs, AI APIs, or AI development frameworks(Azure, AWS,OpenAior similar)
* Proficiencyin C# and/or Python; comfortable picking up new languages and frameworks as needed
* Familiarity with API integration, cloud platforms, and modern software architecture concepts
* Understanding of software development lifecycles and delivery practices
* A prototyping mindset: you know how to build "just enough" tovalidatean idea and can distinguish between proving a concept and over-engineering a demo
* Excellent technical communication skills; you can articulate findings, trade-offs, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences
* Self-directed and comfortable with ambiguity; you can take an open problem and figure out an approach.
* Operate within the R&D stage-gate system; maintain decision records and ensure artefacts meet gate requirements.
* Experience mentoring or guiding junior technical team members
Desirable
* Hands-on experience with process orchestration platforms such as Camunda, Temporal, or similar
* Deeper AI/ML knowledge: model fine-tuning, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, or agent-based approaches
* Familiarity with Azure DevOps for CI/CD, repository management, and collaboration
* Experience in R&D, innovation, or technical exploration roles (not just feature delivery)
* Background in solutions architecture or technical leadership
* Understanding of cloud platforms and infrastructure patterns (Azure preferred)
How You'll Work
You'll report directly to the Head of R&D and supervise junior R&D staff. Day-to-day, you'll collaborate with:
* Architecture team:shaping technical approaches, contributing recommendations, and feeding back learnings from prototyping
* R&D Technical Analyst:directing their hands-on work, reviewing code, and guiding their technical development
* Platform team:specifying infrastructure requirements for R&D environments and proof-of-concept deployments
* Product team:understanding strategic context and ensuring prototypes address genuine business questions
* Development teams:handing over proven approaches with production-ready guidance
You'll balance independent deep-focus work (building, exploring, problem-solving) with collaborative sessions where your findings shape team decisions.
How success is measured
* Strength and clarity of technical recommendations.
* Speed of evaluation cycles.
* Adoption of R&D outputs by delivery teams.
* Quality of handover materials.
What success looks like in your first 90 days
* Delivered multiple R&D prototypes with evidence packs.
* Produced at least two handover-ready technical recommendations.
* Established R&D prototyping templates and artefacts.
* Supported Go / No-Go decisions through architecture forums.
What's In It For You
* The opportunity to work on genuinely novel technical challenges in AI and process automation
* Freedom to explore emerging technologies and shape how we adopt them
* Direct influence on technical strategy through your recommendations to architecture and leadership
* A leadership pathway: scope to grow the R&D function and your role within it
* [Benefits toadd:pension, holidays, flexible working, etc.]
A Few Things to Note
We're looking for someone who combines engineering depth with intellectual curiosity. You should be as comfortable reading a research paper or vendor whitepaper as you are writing code.
The technologies we explore will evolve; what matters most is your ability to learn quickly, build pragmatically, and communicate clearly. If you've spent your career in delivery-focused roles and are looking for something more exploratory, this could be a good fit.