AI Engineer for SaaS (KTP Associate)

University of Essex - Essex Business School

Location: Manchester

Salary: £40,000 per annum

Hours: Full Time

Contract Type: Fixed-Term/Contract

Placed On: 4th September 2025

Closes: 3rd October 2025

Job Ref: REQ09511

KTP

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) are a unique UK-wide activity that help businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity by making better use of the knowledge, technology and skills within universities, colleges and research organisations.

Further information is available at: https://iuk-ktp.org.uk/

THE PROJECT

The University of Essex, with Pimberly Software Development Ltd, is looking for a unique graduate with the right variety of skills to develop a new Digital Product Passport (DPP) module for Pimberly to comply with the upcoming EU's 'Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation' (ESPR), aiming to improve product circularity and transparency.

DUTIES OF THE POST

The duties of the post will include:

• Technical Development
  • Data collection, pre-processing and standardisation
  • Designing the technical architecture to develop and scale a DPP solution
  • Developing, training and testing a suitable ML/AI model and its integration into Pimberly's PIM SaaS platform
• Compliance & Regulation
  • Compliance assurance with ESPR/DPP and related legal and regulatory frameworks
  • Understanding sector specific ESPR/DPP regulatory requirements
• User Experience & Testing
  • Working collaboratively to optimise the user experience while ensuring regulatory clarity
  • Conducting user testing and applying feedback to refine solutions
• Collaboration & Knowledge Transfer
  • Communicating and working with Pimberly and the University of Essex, in an accessible and collaborative way

These duties are a guide to the work that the post holder will initially be required to undertake. They may be changed from time to time to meet changing circumstances.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

Qualifications

• A degree in economics, business, or similar (or a degree in computer science, or similar)
• A master’s in data science, computational data, or similar, or similar industry experience (or in circular economy, supply chains or similar)

Experience

• Experience in contributing to marketing and sales strategies would be an advantage
• Experience of working to GDPR standards is an advantage
• UX design/understanding of accessibility -- including design of usability across multiple devices and user groups
• Stakeholder engagement, preferably with experience of beta testing with user groups
• [Desirable] Experience, or an interest in consumer law would be advantageous

Skills / Abilities

• Enthusiasm and willingness to learn about the ESPR/DPP legal and regulatory frameworks and compliance requirements
• Ability to digest/process/analyse and standardise a large amount of complex legislative information and make recommendations for the planning of product development and sales and marketing campaigning
• Full stack (front and back end) development
• Complex data processing, analysis, management and modelling
• Skills in deploying and maintaining cloud-native solutions
• APIs & Integrations to connect with supply chain platforms
• AI/ML skills to train, test and validate the developed module (e.g., Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.)
• [Desirable] LLM finetuning, prompt engineering, and RAG
• [Desirable] Experience in, or willingness to learn about, product regulatory compliance

LOCATION

Pimberly Software Development Limited

St James's Tower

7 Charlotte Street

Manchester

M1 4DZ

Please use the 'Apply' button to read further information about this role including the full job description and person specification which outlines the full duties, skills, qualifications and experience needed for this role. You will also find details of how to make your application here.

Our website http://www.essex.ac.uk contains more information about the University of Essex. If you have a disability and would like information in a different format, please email resourcing@essex.ac.uk.