Research and Development (9 Month Contract) in Basingstoke

The Engineering department at InfoSum is responsible for designing and delivering innovative data collaboration and AI technologies that power our platform and enable privacy-safe, AI enabled, data partnerships at global scale. Alongside core product development, the department invests in research and experimentation to explore emerging technologies, validate new architectural approaches, and prototype potential future capabilities of the platform. The R&D function plays a key role in bridging research ideas with practical engineering solutions, helping transform promising concepts into prototypes and technical foundations that can evolve into production systems.

As an R&D Engineer, you will work closely with the Chief Architect and engineering leadership to explore new technical ideas, build prototypes, and evaluate emerging technologies that could shape the future direction of the platform. A key part of the role will also involve continuing the development of existing internal research initiatives and evolving them into more mature technical prototypes and early product foundations. This role combines hands-on engineering with exploratory research. You will be responsible for rapidly translating architectural ideas and research concepts into proof-of-concept implementations, experimental prototypes, and early-stage systems that demonstrate feasibility and inform product decisions. In many cases you will take ownership of advancing research work beyond its initial concept stage, iterating on prototypes and expanding them into more complete technical capabilities. While this role is exploratory in nature, it also requires strong AI and engineering discipline. Successful prototypes often evolve into foundations for production systems, and therefore the role requires the ability to build clean, well-structured and maintainable code while iterating quickly.

Core Responsibilities:

• Prototype Implementation: Take architectural ideas and research concepts and turn them into working software prototypes. Build functional implementations that demonstrate how new platform capabilities could work in practice.
• Advancing Research Projects: Contribute to the continued development of existing internal research initiatives by expanding prototypes, improving implementations, and evolving early concepts into more complete technical solutions.
• Experimental Software Development: Design and implement experimental services, tools, agents and infrastructure components using solid engineering practices. Write clear and maintainable code that can serve as the foundation for future product development.
• Technical Exploration & Validation: Explore new frameworks, technologies, and architectural patterns through hands-on development. Evaluate feasibility by building working implementations rather than purely theoretical analysis.
• Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Document implementation approaches, experimental findings, and prototype architectures. Share insights and technical learnings with the broader engineering organization.
• Collaboration: Work closely with architects, engineers, product teams, and infrastructure teams to ensure prototypes and experimental systems can inform real product development.
• Continuous Learning: Stay informed about advances in distributed systems, AI systems, and modern software engineering practices.

Additional company wide requirements: Understand and comply with InfoSum’s security and privacy policies, and be attentive to information security at all times in the performance of duties for InfoSum.

Requirements:

• Understanding of modern AI development workflows including prompt engineering, tool calling, and evaluation of LLM-driven systems.
• Experience integrating LLMs into software systems or building AI-enabled applications.
• Familiarity with agentic architectures, multi-agent systems, or AI orchestration frameworks.
• Understanding of concepts such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool interfaces, or structured context injection for LLMs is beneficial.
• Experience experimenting with AI models or APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar platforms.

The skills needed to deliver the core responsibilities:

• Proficiency in programming languages such as Golang, Java, Python, JavaScript and happy to learn new languages if required.
• Experience with web development frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue.js) and/or backend frameworks.
• Strong understanding of software development methodologies, design patterns, and best practices.
• Familiarity with database technologies (e.g., SQL, NoSQL) and data modeling concepts.
• Knowledge of version control systems (e.g., Git) and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.
• Effective communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to articulate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Previous experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) is a plus.

Benefits:

• A competitive salary based on your experience and ability to perform in role.
• 25 days annual leave (excluding bank holidays) + a day off for your birthday + 2 Volunteering days.
• Private medical insurance.
• Life assurance - 4x your base salary.
• Fantastic corporate discounts and mental wellbeing support, including a top of line EAP.
• Salary sacrifice schemes.
• Enhanced Maternity, Adoption & Share Parental Leave.
• We have fantastic offices in Basingstoke and London complete with a fully stocked fridge / snacks and catered lunches 2 times a week.
• We also reward our teams with monthly socials, 4pm finishes on a Friday & 3pm Fridays finishes during the summer months of June, July and August, 3 extra days off during the Christmas holidays and a culture built on recognition, collaboration and success.