Head of Automation and AI

Role: Head of Automation and AI
Location: Salford, Manchester - Hybrid with 2 days a week at home
Salary: £70,000 to £80,000 + Bonus, Pension

This is an exciting new opportunity within a highly innovative, employee-owned ecommerce retailer based in Salford.

They have fully embraced automation and AI and have reached the stage where they need a technically hands-on leader to guide them and their development teams, creating a roadmap to advance them to best in class digital technology.

Your remit will cover all facets of automation, AI, systems and data leading a team of three as well as external development companies and systems providers.

He company employ around a hundred people and turnover circa £70m which is increasing year on year. The have a young but highly experienced management team that work in a constantly changing and dynamic environment so the ability to be agile is key. They allow for a high level of autonomy and decision making across all roles within the business.

Thew role will be very hands on, taking a lead on coding, creating new prototypes using vibe coding as well as implementing new and replacement systems using third parties.

We are looking for someone to bring ideas as harvest new ones from the senior stakeholders for areas to improve, prioritise, create the roadmap, and then execute with the support of partners such as web-developers and AI agency.

Some of their key objectives for AI, are the development of automation to reduce manual tasks across all functions, advanced decision making and insight, and automated actioning of decisions through applied business logic.

Data is at the centre of everything they do, so establishing a solid data foundation and establishing one version of the truth will also be key in this role.

What are we looking for:

This role is primarily focused on determining areas of the business that could have improved productivity through systems, automation and AI; it could be in any function within the business such as purchasing, pricing, advertising spend, or even tax returns.

To achieve this, we would expect you to have experience across the following:

• Development team management and leadership experience, planning, sprints, mentoring, support etc.
• Strong AI, LLM & Agentic experience.
• Extensive process automation experience.
• Hands on development skills, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Python.
• Strong business engagement experience at all levels.

This role is 3 days week in the office in Salford as the management team are constantly collaborating and moving ideas forward at pace so you will need to be based within a commutable distance of Salford.