AI Innovation Engineer

About the role

This position is instrumental in identifying, evaluating, developing, and implementing new technology solutions, processes, and products that align with the organization’s strategic goals. The AI Innovation Engineer enhances efficiency, improves quality, and drives competitive advantage in a manufacturing environment by monitoring emerging trends, supporting pilot projects, and collaborating with cross-functional partners to drive digital transformation. Successful candidates blend creativity with technical rigor and are able to experiment rapidly while ensuring solutions can scale within enterprise IT standards. This position is located in New Castle, PA.

Responsibilities

• Research, evaluate, and analyze emerging technology trends and manufacturing methods to identify opportunities for innovation in IT and across the organization that drives improved productivity, cost reduction, and/or enhanced product quality.
• Evaluate the potential of new tools, methodologies, and practices to improve operational efficiency and business outcomes.
• Lead innovation projects from concept to implementation.
• Collaborate with engineering, production, quality, and finance teams to identify process inefficiencies and develop innovative solutions.
• Support digital transformation initiatives such as automation, robotics, IoT integration, and data-driven manufacturing.
• Collaborate with cross-functional departments to generate and manage a pipeline of innovation ideas.
• Scout vendors and recommend buy-vs-build paths.
• Develop and maintain documentation for innovation projects, prototypes, and intellectual property considerations.
• Build and maintain an IT innovation roadmap.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders to understand business challenges and propose technology-driven solutions.
• Facilitate brainstorming sessions, workshops, and innovation labs to promote a culture of innovation.
• Collect and analyze data to measure the effectiveness of new technologies and solutions; map current processes and baseline KPIs.
• Support the planning, execution, and evaluation of pilot projects, proof-of-concepts, and innovation initiatives.
• Work closely with development, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure feasibility, compliance, and scalability of solutions.
• Prepare presentations, reports, and business cases to communicate findings and recommendations to leadership.
• Assist in change management and communication efforts to ensure adoption of new technologies.
• Maintain confidentiality and adhere to company compliance and IT security standards.
• Other duties as assigned.
• Willingness to travel occasionally to manufacturing sites to provide on-site support (10%).

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Skills

• Strong understanding of IT systems, digital tools, and project lifecycles.
• Exposure to data analysis, automation tools, or continuous improvement concepts is a plus.
• Familiarity with governance, privacy, and security practices.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Ability to critically evaluate technical designs, vendor proposals, and solution architectures to identify risks, gaps, feasibility issues, and unrealistic assumptions.
• Ability to translate business needs into clear technical concepts, high-level requirements, or prototype workflows.
• Comfort digging into technical details, diagnosing issues across applications, integrations, data flows, and automation platforms, and proposing pragmatic solutions.
• Strong analytical thinking with the ability to evaluate ROI, scalability, long-term maintainability, and operational impact of new technologies.

Preferred Technical Skills

• Experience with AI/ML platforms.
• Exposure to modern programming/scripting such as Python, C#/.NET, SQL, or similar for automation and integrations.
• Familiar with Azure services and Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Dataverse).
• Knowledge of AI agent frameworks.
• Understanding of REST APIs, JSON structures.
• Experience with OCR, Intelligent Document Processing, or AI-assisted workflow automation.