AI Operations Lead in Manchester

Purpose of the Role

Our client has committed, at board level, to embedding new tools and automation across operations as a permanent capability, not a project. This is a new role, working directly with the COO and operational leads to identify what is broken or slow, and to build the fix. You will not be handed a specification. Proof of concept versions of the priority workflows below already exist; your job is to make them permanent, repeatable and used by real people the next day, in a way that stands up to scrutiny in a regulated environment.

Principal Responsibilities

• The tooling library: every prompt, workflow tool, input template and output standard, version controlled and documented.
• Repeatability and iteration: ensuring what works once works identically every time, and improving tools as the business changes.
• Onboarding: run guides and training so the team can use these tools without you in the room.
• The roadmap: a live view of what has been built, what is next, and the business case for each.
• Compliance: producing the evidence and documentation our governance team need to sign things off quickly — keeping how we build things within data protection, security and client obligations.
• Priority workflows: case onboarding and file processing, appeals and complaints handling, client performance narrative on Power BI reports, internal dataset interpretation, and workflow routing across our case volume.

Person Specification

Essential

• Genuine, demonstrable experience using modern tools and automation — things like ChatGPT or Copilot — to solve real operational problems, with actual outputs, not courses. This doesn’t need to come from a job: a personal project or something you’ve built off your own back counts just as much.
• Real, hands-on ability to build something that runs on its own — a script, an automation, a chained set of API calls — not just prompting by hand.
• Strong process thinking; you instinctively map a workflow before trying to fix it.
• Comfort with data at a working level: CSVs, structured inputs, spotting when something is wrong.
• Precise written communication; you can write an instruction someone else follows exactly.
• Commercial awareness, understanding that the client's experience of a report matters as much as its accuracy.
• More hunger and initiative than track record — we’d rather back someone early in their career who has already built things off their own back than someone who has spent a decade doing it one way.

Desirable

• A background in operations rather than software development; a computer science degree or enterprise technology platform experience is not required.
• Years of experience doing this exact job isn’t required either — it doesn’t exist yet, anywhere. What matters is what you’ve actually built, not how long you’ve been building things or what letters follow your name.
• We are not building an enterprise technology platform. We are building something lean, practical, and embedded in how we work. The person who does this well understands operations first and technology second — and is more excited by “let’s just build it and see” than by doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Remuneration and Benefits

• Salary up to £48,000 per annum.
• 25 days paid holiday per annum, plus all Bank and Public Holidays.
• Workplace pension scheme (NEST) with auto enrolment after three months' service.
• Hybrid working from our Manchester base with flexibility on pattern. 37.5 hour work week.
• A genuinely autonomous role with direct access to the COO from day one, and board-level commitment to this already in place.
• A governance and compliance team who will help you ship safely — you’re backed, not carrying regulatory risk on your own.
• A lean organisation where what you build gets used, not shelved.
• A role that will not look the same in twelve months — because you will have changed it.