AI Architect

AI Architect Location: Leeds, UK Contract: Permanent, Full-Time Salary: Competitive About Protect Group Protect Group specialises in enhancing customer experience and generating additional revenue for businesses through innovative technology solutions. Founded in 2016, we’ve rapidly grown to serve over 400 business partners across 75+ countries, with a presence in 12 global offices. Our dynamic, AI-driven widget integrates seamlessly into online booking and sales platforms, providing customer-centric solutions that boost satisfaction and ancillary revenue without significant upfront costs. At Protect Group, innovation is at our core — we continuously seek new ideas and technologies to stay ahead in today’s fast-changing market. As a part of the Protect Group team, you will join a community that values collaboration and a shared purpose, fostering a strong sense of community. We believe in accountability and owning our responsibilities, ensuring that we deliver on promises and find solutions when challenges arise. 'Protect People' are talented, ambitious, and passionate individuals who bring energy and enthusiasm to their work every day. We are looking for someone who shares our passion for disrupting global industries across transportation, travel, hospitality, events, and financial services, driving continuous growth and success. Role Description Protect Group is heavily engaged with multiple AI projects - both within the products and services we offer and our internal business processes. The successful use and leveraging of AI is critical to our future objectives. As an AI Architect you will be responsible for continuing and promoting our use of AI. This is a hands-on engineering role where you’ll be expected to build AI solutions - working across multiple functions, especially with our Data Science team, to achieve the best results. You will design and govern the end-to-end architecture that takes AI from experiment to production. This is a systems-design role, not a model-training role. You decide how data, models, agents, applications, and infrastructure fit together so we can ship AI that is reliable, secure, cost-aware, and aligned with the business. Obvious areas of advancement with AI include… * Use within our products, platforms and services. * Use within our development process (testing, IDE, project/task management, documentation, etc). * Use within the tech department (automating tasks, etc). * AI tool review (to support business approvals + security considerations). * Be the AI champion/evangelist within the tech team. You will set reference architectures for predictive ML, generative AI, RAG, and agentic systems; choose platforms and patterns teams can reuse; and hold the line on quality, governance, and operational readiness. The role requires strategic thinking and strong business acumen. We are a fast moving, constantly developing business with an evolving technology platform within a very fast-moving requirement environment. We expect you to be considered, flexible, well-versed in technological trends and pathways, familiar with a variety of business concepts and a strong communicator of strategic and operational IT planning and activity to a non-technical audience. Key Responsibilities * Be an active part of the company’s technology and AI vision and support all aspects of the company’s technological and AI development. * Be part of the product roadmap development and delivery in consultation with the leadership team, sales, finance and risk functions. * Work in a consultative fashion with other departments, such as sales, product, data and CX as an advisor of technologies that may improve their efficiency and effectiveness. * Discover and implement new methodologies that yield competitive advantage for Protect Group. * Develop technical and AI aspects of the company’s strategy to ensure alignment with its business objectives. * Help ingrain throughout the business the application and use technology and AI to deliver and maximise profitably. * Conduct robust testing and quality assurance processes. * Applying security and governance best practice across our AI solutions. * Use stakeholders’ feedback to inform necessary improvements and adjustments to technology. Professional Competence * Working in an agile environment * Leadership and organisational abilities * Ability to conduct analysis and research * Excellent communication skills * Strategic thinking * Problem-solving aptitude * GDPR and International Data Regulations Awareness Technical Competence Required experience: * Azure AI * Azure Foundry / Foundry IQ / AI Hub * Computer Vision * Document Intelligence * Text Analytics * Speech Services * Translation Services * Python * ML / LLMs * C# .Net Standard / C# .Net Core / C# .Net * SQL Server Preferred but not essential experience: * Unit testing and integration testing * Microservices / serverless architecture * Web API / REST API Services * Entity Framework * Azure * Devops / CI / CD * ServiceBus * App Service / Web App * Function App * Redis * React * Insurance industry * Claims processing and management