Senior AI Operations Manager in Birmingham

Mace combines construction expertise with consultancy to unlock potential in every person or project and redefine the boundaries of ambition. Our values shape the way we consult and define the people we want to join us on our journey. Mace consult is scaling its AI capability from early adoption into a core, business-wide function, with active executive sponsorship. Unlike many businesses limiting themselves to off‑the‑shelf AI tooling, Mace consult is building proprietary AI solutions designed to deliver measurable, client‑facing outcomes across a global operation.

The role will be UK‑based London or Birmingham (hybrid), with a global remit and a core delivery team based in India.

You’ll Be Responsible For:

• Maintaining stable, secure and efficient day‑to‑day operations across all AI platforms and services.
• Influencing and upholding AI service SLAs, ensuring security, availability and performance levels are met.
• Driving continuous improvement of AI platforms through automation, monitoring, optimisation and technical debt reduction.
• Owning operational runbooks, support models and service documentation.
• Influencing the design and development of operational reporting and monitoring tooling and maintaining it to ensure ongoing visibility of AI service health and performance.

Enhancement and continuous improvement:

• Working with the Product Manager to assess and prioritise enhancements to existing AI capabilities, providing operational insight to inform decisions.
• Translating business and product priorities into clearly defined delivery backlogs for the AI engineering teams.
• Overseeing delivery of incremental enhancements, ensuring changes are tested, validated and deployed safely.

Delivery and transition to operations:

• Accountable for transitioning new AI capabilities from development into live operations.
• Ensuring operational readiness, including support processes, monitoring, resilience and security controls.
• Working with application support and wider digital services teams to embed AI solutions into BAU support.

Team and delivery management:

• Coordinating a remote, India‑based engineering team covering platform, data and AI specialisms.
• Providing clear direction, priorities and outcomes for the AI engineering teams.
• Ensuring delivery capacity is aligned to agreed priorities and service commitments.

Governance, risk and assurance:

• Ensuring AI solutions operate in line with digital, security, data and architecture standards.
• Identifying and managing operational risks, issues and dependencies relating to AI services.
• Accountable for compliance with relevant policies, AI governance principles and regulatory obligations.
• Providing regular operational reporting across service performance, SLA adherence and delivery progress to both leadership and key stakeholders.

You’ll Need To Have:

• Strong experience operating and supporting AI or advanced analytics platforms in a production environment.
• Proven experience managing AI security and governance in a production environment, including access controls, data privacy and responsible AI practices.
• Proven experience working within DevOps operating models, including CI/CD, monitoring and incident management.
• Solid understanding of generative and discriminative AI concepts, including model types, limitations and appropriate use cases.
• Experience working with cloud platforms, APIs and modern application architectures.
• Experience of AI platforms operating at enterprise scale.
• Familiarity with data engineering, ML Ops or model lifecycle management practices.
• Experience with Microsoft AI Platforms and supporting technologies, including Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft copilot ecosystems.
• Familiarity with Oracle AI ecosystem.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, able to translate complex technical concepts into clear operational outcomes.
• Structured and methodical approach to problem solving and service improvement.
• Commercial awareness and ability to balance cost, risk and value.
• Proven experience leading and coordinating distributed, offshore delivery teams.
• Ability to set clear priorities, drive accountability and maintain delivery focus for a remote team.
• Building and maintaining effective working relationships across product, engineering and support functions to drive outcomes without direct line management authority.
• Significant experience (typically 5+ years) operating technology platforms or services within medium to large enterprises.
• 2+ years’ experience in AI advanced analytics or software platform operations (or equivalent experience) in a production environment.
• Proven experience coordinating remote, offshore delivery teams as part of a technology operations role.
• Experience transitioning innovative or emerging technologies into live operational environments.

Our values:

• Safety first – Going home safe and well: We champion a safe, diverse and inclusive working environment, understanding the importance of wellbeing in every team.
• Client focus – Deliver on our promise: We own the quality of deliverables, strategic outcomes and build long term relationships with our clients.
• Integrity – Always do the right thing: We influence positive outcomes within our industry, while always aligning with our compliance obligations.
• Create opportunity – For our people to excel: We champion a continuous improvement culture throughout all activities, inspiring our people and teams to develop.

Mace is an inclusive employer and welcomes interest from a diverse range of candidates. Even if you feel you do not fulfil all the criteria, please apply as you may still be the best candidate for this role or another role within our organisation. We are also open to discussing part‑time, flexible, and hybrid working options if suitable within the role.