Contract Principal Operations Engineer (Automation & AI)

Location: UK or Portugal

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Contract (B2B) (with potential to transition to permanent)

Contract Length: 6 months (with potential for extension)

About YLD: Our goal is to help our clients keep moving forward. We work with them to build the skills and capabilities they need to stay ahead of the competition, and we know our success only happens when they succeed. We’re a team of curious, talented people, and we’re committed to making YLD a place where great people want to work, grow, and stay. We’re a remote-first consultancy specialising in software engineering, product design, and data. Our teams are based across London, Lisbon, and Porto, and we create digital solutions that continue to deliver value long after our work is done.

About the role: As a Principal Operations Engineer at YLD, you will help remove friction from how YLD operates. This role will start as a senior consulting engagement. The intent is to move quickly, deliver tangible improvements, and learn what the long-term shape of this capability should be. Based on outcomes and mutual fit, there may be an opportunity to transition into a permanent role, but this is not assumed upfront. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who can move comfortably between business problems and technical solutions. You will work across People, Finance, Engineering, Product Design, Client Services, and Commercial, identifying where work is slow, manual, or overly complex and fixing it. This is not a coordination or advisory role. You will be expected to design, build, automate, and ship improvements yourself, using code, automation, and AI as first-class tools. The role reports to the COO and works closely with the leadership team. Regular travel to Portugal is expected to stay close to teams and how work actually happens.

Your day-to-day responsibilities:

• Eliminate operational friction
• Identify high-leverage operational pain points across the business
• Remove unnecessary steps, manual work, and duplicated effort
• Replace fragile processes with simple, resilient systems
• Focus on outcomes, not documentation for its own sake

Build and automate internal systems:

• Design and build internal tools, workflows, and automations
• Integrate and extend existing platforms (HRIS, finance systems, CRM, access management, internal tooling), working closely with external partners where needed to ensure systems fit together cleanly and workflows work end-to-end
• Use scripting, APIs, low-code, and AI where they meaningfully improve speed and consistency
• Treat internal operations as a product, with users, feedback loops, and iteration

Apply AI pragmatically:

• Identify where AI can remove cognitive or manual load
• Implement AI-assisted workflows that teams actually adopt
• Balance speed with safety, judgement, and data responsibility
• Focus on practical leverage rather than experimentation theatre

Work closely with teams and leadership:

• Work directly with Client Partners, People, Finance, Heads of, and the leadership team
• Understand how work happens in practice and where constraints show up
• Deliver improvements in small, practical increments
• Reduce reliance on ad-hoc escalation and manual coordination

Create sustainable foundations:

• Ensure improvements are understandable, maintainable, and clearly owned
• Document systems and processes where it materially reduces risk, improves continuity, or supports scale
• Help define what longer-term operational capability should look like as YLD continues to scale

You’ll have the following skills and experience:

• Strong engineering background (software, platform, automation, or systems engineering)
• Proven experience applying technical solutions to business or operational problems
• Comfort working across non-technical teams such as People, Finance, and Commercial
• High judgement and the confidence to make trade-offs
• Experience using automation and AI in real workflows, not just demos

This role is for you if:

• You are an engineer who enjoys solving business and operational problems
• You like working end-to-end, from messy problem to shipped solution
• You are comfortable operating with ambiguity and imperfect information
• You focus on simplifying how work gets done by removing unnecessary steps and manual effort
• You think in systems but stay close to how people actually work
• You see AI and automation as leverage, not magic
• You get satisfaction from making other people’s work easier and faster

This role is not for you if:

• You want a strategy or advisory-only role
• You prefer writing recommendations over building solutions
• You are uncomfortable touching real systems or tooling
• You expect fully defined requirements before starting
• You want to manage a large team rather than ship yourself
• You are most comfortable working in heavily governed, committee-driven environments

What success looks like in the first months:

• High-friction operational workflows have been simplified or removed
• Manual work has been replaced with automation where it makes sense
• Teams report clearer ownership and less operational drag
• Leadership time spent on day-to-day operational problem-solving is visibly reduced
• Internal systems feel easier, faster, and more predictable to use, with clear ownership and lightweight documentation where it matters

Our typical Recruitment Process looks like this:

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
• 2nd Interview with two of our Engineers (~1h30)
• 3rd Panel Interview with our COO, Head of Client Services and Head of People (1h30)

We live and breathe our values, and know you will too:

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity in all its forms. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability. We also offer a remote-first working environment, with flexible working and work–life balance as standard for all employees.