AI Automation Lead in London

hackajob is collaborating with Third Bridge Group to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role. Third Bridge is a leading global research firm established in 2007, with a team of over 1,500 employees worldwide dedicated to fueling decisions with expert insights. We accelerate and enhance decision-making for investors and business leaders by unearthing unique expert insights across multiple sectors, geographies, and topics. For nearly 20 years, we’ve helped clients access knowledge on demand from experts, in-person and through our Library covering over 65,000 companies. Third Bridge is building its AI function from scratch — and you're the person who will define what it becomes. Reporting directly to our COO, you'll lead a growing team of AI Solution Engineers across London and Mumbai, and build the governance, architecture, and prioritisation frameworks that will shape how AI is embedded across our entire organisation.

What You'll Do

• Map and own the opportunity landscape: You'll work directly with business leads to identify and prioritise AI automation opportunities — deciding what the central team owns versus what local teams run themselves, and building a 12–24 month roadmap that balances impact, feasibility, and risk.
• Build the governance architecture: You'll design the systemic protocols, agent approval frameworks, and risk controls that allow Third Bridge to demonstrate positive control over AI technology as it scales — across hundreds of live agents, client-facing and internal.
• Lead and develop your team: Your AI Solution Engineers will look to you for direction, unblocking, and credibility. You'll earn that last one through your own technical chops — this is a role where you need to be able to do, not just direct.
• Drive adoption, not just delivery: Solutions that get built and thrown over the fence don't count. You'll sit with business stakeholders, ensure every deployment actually lands and gets used, and build the trust that makes future work possible.
• Build capability that outlasts the central team: Working with L&D, you'll upskill business units so they can build and iterate within your framework — reducing dependency on the central AI team over the next 12–18 months.

What You'll Bring

• You bring a rare combination: the commercial judgment of a senior operator, the technical credibility of someone who has genuinely built with AI, and the leadership presence to establish a new function from scratch.
• Operational or consulting depth with real AI delivery: Your experience in business operations, transformation, or management consulting have allowed you to directly deliver AI or automation programmes — not advising on them from a distance.
• Hands-on technical capability: You can build as well as strategise. Your experience with prompt engineering, AI agent design, and LLM capabilities means the engineers on your team will respect you — and our stakeholders will trust you.
• Governance and risk fluency: You've designed AI governance frameworks in regulated environments before. You understand that moving fast and maintaining control aren't mutually exclusive — and you know how to make that case to a Compliance team.
• Influence without authority: Your track record includes embedding technology solutions across organisations where you didn't have direct control. You get adoption through trust, not mandate.
• Comfort with genuine ambiguity: You've built structure where little existed. If you need certainty before you can move, this isn't the right environment — but if a blank sheet of paper is where you do your best work, it is.

How will you be rewarded?

• Vacation: 25 days (which increases to 28 days after 2 years of service) plus UK Bank Holidays
• Learning: personal development allowance of £1000 per year
• Health and wellbeing: private medical insurance and healthcare cash plan, a variety of health and wellbeing events to focus on mental health, Ride to Work scheme (savings on bikes and accessories)
• Future and family: pension contributions of 4% (increases with tenure) and life insurance of 4x of your base salary
• Flexibility: work from anywhere for one month per year, 2 annual volunteer days, 2 personal days when life throws you a curveball and 'Summer Fridays'
• Rewards: get points through our colleague-to-colleague recognition programme to spend on hotels, gift cards, donations to charity and more
• Social: optional social gatherings, daily breakfast and snacks, social events
• ESG: CSR, Environment and Diversity & Inclusion (including Women at Third Bridge, Pride and Blkbridge)
• Frontline Innovation: your chance to share your ideas for improvement through Hackathons and other events

Why Join Us?

• A genuinely founding brief: You're not inheriting someone else's playbook. You'll write the one that everyone at Third Bridge follows for the next decade — defining what the AI function looks like, how it's structured, and what it stands for.
• Direct line to the top: You report to the COO and will have executive visibility from day one. Your work will be front and centre!
• Build your own team: You'll recruit and shape your AI Solution Engineers, set the standard for technical quality, and define the culture of the function.
• A business that's already bought in: Third Bridge already has enthusiastic AI adopters across the organisation — you're not convincing sceptics. The foundation is there; you're the architect.
• Scope that evolves with you: As capability embeds across business units, the role grows — the best outcome is a distributed model you designed, which opens the door to broader Group-level technology and transformation leadership.

Third Bridge values your trust and is committed to the responsible management, use, and protection of personal information. By submitting a Third Bridge job application, I hereby provide Third Bridge (including Third Bridge's affiliates and relevant third-party suppliers) with my consent to collect, store and process my personal information for the purpose of recruitment administration, as well as to share such personal information with third parties for the same purpose, in accordance with the Candidate Privacy Notice. We know that to be truly innovative, we need to have a diverse team around us. That is why Third Bridge is committed to creating an inclusive environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. If you are not 100% sure if you are right for the role, please apply anyway, and we will be happy to consider your application.