Senior Security Innovation Engineer (AI)

Location: Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom. Hybrid role with 60% of the week spent collaborating at office locations or local sites and the remainder remotely.

Company

Tesco combines retail, technology, and mobile network services to improve experiences for customers, colleagues, and communities.

What you will do

• Design, build, test, and operationalise innovative security capabilities from initial concept through production operation.
• Apply AI and automation to improve cyber defence outcomes, including enrichment, reasoning support, detection ideation, and engineering productivity.
• Develop secure, maintainable, and scalable capabilities using modern software engineering, automated testing, version control, and repeatable release practices.
• Evaluate security solutions through technical requirements, success criteria, functionality testing, and threat-informed validation.
• Collaborate with Cyber Threat Intelligence, Detection Engineering, Security Automation Engineering, and wider technology stakeholders.
• Set engineering direction, communicate trade-offs, share knowledge, and drive adoption of proven capabilities across teams.

Requirements

• Applied AI experience in cyber defence, including safe delivery of use cases with human accountability and appropriate guardrails.
• Experience designing or reviewing AI-enabled architectures, including data flows, model and tool selection, orchestration, controls, security, and operability.
• Strong technical security architecture and programming experience demonstrated through production-grade tools, automations, or services.
• Understanding of secure, test-driven engineering, automated testing, disciplined change control, and software delivery practices.
• Ability to evaluate security controls, analyse data and trends, define meaningful measures, and communicate defensive impact.
• Strong strategic thinking, communication, influencing, learning, change leadership, and commitment to inclusive engineering environments.

Nice to have

• Awareness of AI governance, compliance, privacy, data protection, responsible AI, and risk management.
• Contributions to the engineering profession through communities, publications, talks, mentoring, open source, or recognised learning.
• Familiarity with Tesco’s technology landscape, retail technology, CI/CD, Jira, Zendesk, xMatters, technical interviewing, and iterative product delivery.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working with flexible support for balancing office and remote work.
• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary.
• At least 25 days of holiday plus a personal day and bank holidays.
• Private medical insurance and a free 24/7 virtual GP service.
• Paid maternity, adoption, and paternity leave, plus an Employee Assistance Programme and mental wellbeing support.
• Inclusive and accessible recruitment and working environment.