Lead AI Engineer at Acorn Insurance

Compensation

£60,000/yr

Setup: Hybrid
Location: Liverpool, England
Type: Full-time
Level: lead/mgmt
Posted: Jun 23, 2026

Description

Acorn Insurance is hiring a Lead AI Engineer in Liverpool City Centre on a hybrid basis. The senior individual contributor will lead the engineering practice, AI platform infrastructure, observability, governance, API integrations, and technical direction for Acorn’s AI Services function. The role requires a strong production software or AI/ML engineering background, LLM application knowledge, API and DevOps expertise, and experience mentoring engineers and operating in regulated environments. The salary is up to £60,000 depending on experience, with 37.5 hours per week.

Required Skills

Azure
AKS
Terraform
Helm
Azure Pipelines
RAG
REST
OpenAPI
Observability
Governance
Contract testing

Additional Information

Required Previous Experiences: Strong production engineering track record in software, AI, or machine learning at scale in reliable environments
Experience establishing observability, governance, and audit practices at scale
Experience mentoring engineers across teams and shaping engineering culture
Preferred Qualifications: Working knowledge of LLM application patterns, including RAG, structured extraction, evaluation, prompt and context engineering, and agentic workflows
Ability to integrate APIs cleanly using REST, webhooks, OpenAPI, authentication, retry and backoff, and contract testing
Familiarity with conversational AI platforms such as Boost.ai or ElevenLabs
DevOps fluency across Azure, AKS, Helm, Terraform, and Azure Pipelines
Awareness of regulated-environment constraints including data residency, auditability, ZDR, and model risk
Ability to make and defend architecture and tooling decisions