Lead AI Engineer

Acorn Insurance is hiring a Lead AI Engineer. A senior individual contributor role responsible for the engineering practice, platform and infrastructure underpinning our AI Services function. You will help drive the AI strategy at Acorn, push our technical direction and platform decisions, and bring strong software engineering discipline to how AI gets built.

Job title: Lead AI Engineer

Salary: up to £60,000 depending on experience

Working hours: 37.5 hours per week, Monday to Friday

Location: Liverpool City Centre on a hybrid working basis

What you’ll be doing

• Help lead AI strategy at Acorn alongside the Head of AI Services: shape direction, roadmap and the engineering vision for the function.
• Own a substantial share of the AI platform infrastructure: Azure, AKS, Terraform, Helm, Azure Pipelines. Lead its evolution, reliability and operational health.
• Lead engineering practice across AI Services: code review, testing, source control hygiene, deployment patterns, observability.
• Set and uphold observability, performance and governance standards for AI solutions across the business: DPIAs, model documentation, audit trails, evaluation harnesses.
• Integrate APIs cleanly: REST and webhook patterns, OpenAPI, authentication, retry / backoff, contract testing.
• Partner with the Conversational AI workstream to integrate internal APIs with Chat and Voice tooling (Boost.ai, ElevenLabs, comparable platforms).
• Lead evaluation of new platforms, frameworks and AI tooling; drive adoption decisions for the function.
• Act as technical escalation point for AI engineers across the wider function.
• Run cross-team forums to share patterns, new tooling and engineering practice.
• Lead expansion of AI capability into new business domains as the AI estate grows.
• Provide technical direction and mentorship to engineers across teams; raise the engineering bar.
• Operate within a regulated AI governance model: DPIAs, model documentation, observability, human‑in‑the‑loop where appropriate.

This is the technical seat in the AI function with the Group AI Team. You will support by owning the platform, setting the bar for engineering practice, and shaping how AI scales at Acorn across new domains and use cases.

What we’re looking for

• Strong production engineering track record – software, AI or ML at scale, in environments where reliability matters. Real software development practice, not just AI tinkering.
• Working knowledge of LLM application patterns: RAG, structured extraction, evals, prompt and context engineering, agentic workflows.
• Comfort integrating APIs cleanly – REST / webhook, OpenAPI, authentication patterns, retry / backoff, contract testing. You understand how production integrations actually fail.
• Conversational AI awareness – familiarity with Boost.ai, ElevenLabs or comparable voice / chat platforms, and how to wire them up to internal systems sensibly.
• DevOps fluency: Azure (essential), AKS, Helm, Terraform, Azure Pipelines strongly preferred. Comfortable across the whole stack rather than purely application‑layer.
• Track record of putting observability, governance and audit story in place at scale.
• Awareness of the constraints of regulated environments: data residency, auditability, ZDR, model risk – design with them in mind from the start.
• Track record of mentoring engineers across teams and shaping engineering culture.
• Comfortable making and defending architecture / tooling calls; comfortable being challenged.
• Senior enough to operate as a credible technical co‑owner of the AI platform alongside the Head of AI Services.

Benefits

• A maximum of 35 days’ holiday (depending on role and tenure) including bank holidays, with additional buy/sell options
• 24/7 mental health support & free counselling available
• Grow with us: Through career fairs, leadership programmes, and learning on the go!
• Flexible benefits, including early access to salary via our internal platform
• Hybrid working options to support work‑life balance and individual needs
• Recognition awards, social events & more