AI Transformation Principal in Manchester

Who are AND?

We're on a mission to close the world's tech skills gap. We help organisations navigate the future of technology, combining human expertise, emerging tech and AI to deliver better outcomes, faster. Since 2014, we've worked side-by-side with clients to solve complex challenges, build high-performing teams, and create lasting capability. As technology continues to evolve, we believe the most successful organisations will be those that combine the best of both: human ingenuity AND intelligent technology.

That belief is embedded in everything we do. We call it the genius of the AND: deep expertise AND practical delivery, innovation AND responsibility, ambitious work AND sustainable careers. Through our Guide, Build and Equip approach, we help organisations embrace change, deliver meaningful impact, and develop the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly agentic world.

About you

• You care deeply about producing high-quality work that delivers real value.
• You're comfortable navigating ambiguity and solving complex problems collaboratively.
• You bring strong expertise in your craft, alongside a willingness to keep learning.
• You communicate clearly and build trust quickly with clients and teammates.
• You're pragmatic, adaptable and outcome-focused.
• You enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others grow.
• You value low-ego collaboration and enjoy working as part of multidisciplinary teams.

The Role

As an AI Transformation Principal, you will lead multidisciplinary teams to design, deliver and embed AI solutions that solve real business problems and create measurable value for our clients. You'll combine strong AI technical understanding with hands-on delivery experience, business transformation expertise and the ability to build trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders.

You will lead a team in AI engagements from initial discovery and opportunity prioritisation through solution design, build, deployment and adoption. Working closely with client Leads and Heads Ofs, you'll translate business ambitions into practical delivery plans, guide technical and product teams, and ensure solutions are safe, scalable and deliver the outcomes intended.

This is a hands-on leadership role. We don't expect you to be the deepest technical specialist in every room, but we do expect you to understand how modern AI solutions are built, be comfortable getting into the technical detail, challenge architectural and delivery decisions, and have first-hand experience of taking AI solutions into production.

Beyond delivering individual solutions, you'll help clients develop the processes, capabilities, governance and operating models needed to sustain and scale AI adoption long after an engagement ends.

It's essential this person has experience:

• Proven AI Delivery Experience: First-hand experience designing, building or directly contributing to AI solutions deployed into production, with a clear understanding of the challenges involved in moving from experimentation to live business operations.
• Engagement leadership: A track record of independently leading multidisciplinary technology or AI engagements, managing client relationships and taking accountability for delivery outcomes.
• Business transformation experience: Experience translating technology capabilities into changes to business processes, operating models or ways of working, with evidence of successful adoption.
• AI technical understanding: Practical knowledge of modern AI architectures and delivery approaches, with the confidence to engage in detailed technical discussions and challenge engineering decisions.
• Commercial and value focus: Ability to build a credible business case, prioritise opportunities and demonstrate the measurable impact of delivered solutions.

What the role will be doing, and you can bring to the table:

1. AI Engagement & Delivery Leadership: Proven experience leading multidisciplinary teams to deliver technology or AI solutions, taking accountability for scope, delivery quality, risks, outcomes and client satisfaction.
2. Discovery & Prioritisation: Ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into clearly defined AI opportunities, prioritised against value, feasibility, risk and implementation effort.
3. Agile Delivery: Experience leading iterative delivery, balancing rapid experimentation with the engineering discipline and governance required to take solutions into production.
4. Product & Engineering Collaboration: Confidence working across business stakeholders, product managers, engineers, architects and change teams to turn requirements into working solutions.
5. Value Realisation: Ability to establish measurable success criteria, baseline performance and track outcomes, ensuring delivered solutions create tangible business value rather than simply demonstrating technical capability.

2. Business Transformation & AI Adoption:

• Business Process Redesign: Experience identifying how AI can improve or fundamentally change business processes, including the design of human-in-the-loop and agentic workflows.
• Operating Model Transformation: Ability to design and implement changes to roles, responsibilities, processes and governance required to embed AI into day-to-day operations.
• Organisational Readiness & Adoption: Experience helping teams adopt new technology and ways of working through stakeholder engagement, capability building, training and structured change activities.
• AI Governance & Responsible Adoption: Understanding of AI-related risks, including data privacy, security, reliability, regulatory considerations and responsible AI practices, with the ability to embed appropriate controls into delivery.
• Sustainable Capability Building: Commitment to equipping client teams with the knowledge, tools and ways of working needed to maintain, operate and extend AI solutions independently.

3. AI Solutions & Technical Understanding:

• Hands-on AI Delivery: First-hand experience designing, building or directly contributing to the delivery of AI-powered solutions, from initial experimentation through to production deployment.
• Applied AI Experience: Practical understanding & experience of using modern AI technologies, including LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI agents, orchestration frameworks and intelligent automation; with a focus of applying the right approach for different business problems.
• Technical Solution Leadership: Ability to work confidently alongside AI engineers, architects and developers, challenging solution designs, understanding technical trade-offs and guiding decisions around integration, scalability and maintainability.
• Enterprise AI Integration: Understanding of how AI solutions connect with enterprise data, APIs, existing platforms and business workflows, including the importance of identity, access controls and trusted context.
• Production AI Quality: Practical knowledge of AI evaluation, testing, observability, security, cost and performance considerations, ensuring solutions are reliable and fit for real-world use.

4. Consulting & Client Leadership:

• Trusted Client Partner: Build strong relationships with on-the-ground clients such as Leads, Heads of and other senior stakeholders, providing practical advice and taking ownership of day-to-day engagement success.
• Structured Problem Solving: Bring clarity to complex or ambiguous challenges, translating business needs into actionable recommendations and delivery plans.
• Commercial Awareness: Understand the commercial drivers behind AI investments, articulate value and identify opportunities for further work that benefit the client.
• Team Leadership & Coaching: Lead and develop multidisciplinary teams, creating an environment of collaboration, high-quality delivery and continuous learning.
• Communication & Influence: Communicate technical and business concepts clearly, facilitate challenging conversations and build alignment across stakeholders with different priorities.

It would be great, but not essential, if you can also bring:

• Experience delivering agentic AI solutions or multi-agent workflows.
• Familiarity with platforms and frameworks such as Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, Databricks, Snowflake, Claude Code or Claude Agent SDK.
• Experience working in regulated or complex enterprise environments.
• Experience establishing AI delivery governance, evaluation approaches or LLMOps practices.
• Experience coaching client teams and building sustainable internal AI capabilities.

Why join AND Digital?

We're building a culture where talented people can do meaningful work, continue growing, AND enjoy the journey along the way. Our model is designed to build belonging and connection: we're organised into regional 'Clubs' of no more than 80 people, so you (and our clients) get the benefits of that small company feel while also being connected to a larger whole.

Our Practice Areas act as a 'second home' for our ANDis - a place where you can innovate and learn with like-minded experts who care deeply about their craft, support each other generously, and believe the best ideas come from collaboration, not hierarchy.

Our culture is rooted in our values of Wonder, Share and Delight, and shows up through five traits that we celebrate and nurture in all our ANDis: we value curiosity, ambition and a growth-mindset. We are deeply client-centric. Most important of all we are human - we create an inclusive environment where people feel trusted, supported and able to be themselves.

By joining AND, we'll provide:

• 25 days bookable holiday + flexible Bank Holidays.
• Pension: 6% of salary paid by AND Digital with a further 2% paid by you (can be increased by choice).
• Aviva healthcare cover (including pre-existing condition cover) for you.
• Flexibenefit: 1000 assigned to you via our benefits portal to select or upgrade the benefits that suit you the most. Any unused allowance from the 1000 can be taken as cash.
• Life Assurance.
• Income Protection.
• Eye test + first pair of glasses.
• Parental Benefits: Generous Enhanced Maternity and Enhanced Partner (Paternity) Leave.

Diversity and inclusion are hugely important to us, and we're committed to providing equal opportunities for all. We're actively recruiting for a diverse and inclusive workforce so want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel safe and empowered to let us know if you need any adjustments to be made to your application or interview process, so please speak to our recruitment team.