Innovation Engineer

Job Summary

The Innovation Engineer role involves prototyping and evaluating emerging technologies and AI capabilities to reduce risks before product development. The position focuses on running time-limited proofs of concept with clear success criteria and delivering validated outcomes for further development.

Responsibilities

• Monitor and assess new technologies, platforms, frameworks, and AI relevant to the company’s products and markets.
• Evaluate technologies considering existing infrastructure, regulations, team skills, and costs.
• Maintain a documented list of technologies to pursue or exclude with justifications.
• Present technology assessments to leadership highlighting business opportunities, costs, and risks.
• Design and execute proofs of concept with defined questions, success criteria, and time limits.
• Develop prototypes that test key risks and edge cases, not only ideal scenarios.
• Measure and report results objectively, including inconclusive outcomes.
• Provide evidence-based go/no-go recommendations with assumptions and conditions.
• Estimate productization costs, efforts, and risks, and document lessons from unsuccessful trials.
• Deliver proven work to Development or AI teams with reference implementations and documentation.
• Support early productization ensuring prototype code is not used in production without proper engineering controls.
• Evaluate AI/ML capabilities including hosted and open models, RAG, vector search, and inference costs across Azure AI, Azure OpenAI, and similar services.
• Collaborate with AI team to define boundaries between research and production model development.
• Assess data availability, quality, licensing, and residency before recommending AI solutions.
• Test AI outputs for reliability, bias, and failure modes, identifying unreliable capabilities.

Requirements

• Minimum 6 years of experience in Software Engineering
• Strong hands-on experience with .NET / ASP.NET Core and C# (Backend)
• Strong hands-on experience with React or React Native
• Experience with TypeScript, MS SQL Server/PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, and Kubernetes
• Experience building prototypes and Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and evaluating new technologies
• Practical experience with AI/Generative AI, including LLM integration, RAG, and model/prompt evaluation
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Azure, including Azure AI/Azure OpenAI

What the company offers

• Onsite work model with 5 days in office

We refresh listings regularly, but some roles close early on the source platform.