Senior R&D Engineer (Prototyping / Tech Explorer) in Peterlee

About The Role

We are 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.

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.
  • Create reference 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 for PoCs, 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; leverage their 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 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, practical applications and 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, OpenAI or similar).
• Proficiency in 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" to validate an 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

• 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.

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.

A Few Things to Note

We are 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 have spent your career in delivery-focused roles and are looking for something more exploratory, this could be a good fit.