AI & Automation Lead

AI & Automation Lead

Bolton | Hybrid – 2 days a week onsite

AI Engineering | LLMs | GenAI | Agentic AI | n8n | Technical Leadership | Cloud

We're looking for an AI & Automation Lead to provide hands-on technical leadership across an established AI engineering team.

This is a technical role for someone with strong AI engineering experience and hands-on n8n expertise, who enjoys building solutions, solving complex engineering problems and helping other engineers deliver high-quality work.

You'll lead the technical delivery across a team of three AI Engineers while remaining hands-on with coding and technically complex work yourself.

A key part of the role will be helping mature the existing AI and automation environment – establishing robust n8n engineering standards, improving monitoring and resilience, and ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable and production-ready.

What you'll be doing

You'll provide day-to-day technical leadership to the AI engineering team, helping determine how solutions are designed, built, deployed and supported.

You'll:

• Lead the technical design and delivery of AI, LLM and GenAI solutions
• Remain hands-on with coding and development, particularly on technically complex or novel work
• Establish and embed a robust n8n design and implementation framework
• Define appropriate monitoring and alerting across workflow automation services
• Improve the resilience and reliability of existing AI solutions and processes
• Support AI Engineers with solution design, technical challenges and engineering decisions
• Set and maintain high standards around coding, development, testing and deployment
• Review technical approaches and code, identifying potential issues before they reach production
• Ensure AI and automation solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable and production-ready
• Lead a team of three AI Engineers, managing priorities, workloads and technical delivery
• Provide technical 1:1s, mentoring and support, helping remove blockers and develop the team
• Set team objectives and identify where additional technical resource may be required
• Develop reusable components, templates and engineering best practice
• Work alongside wider internal and offshore technical teams
• Support effective cost management across n8n and AI processes

What we're looking for?

There are two key areas of experience we're looking for: hands-on AI engineering and strong n8n experience.

You'll have:

• Hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML solutions into production, including production coding experience
• Strong knowledge of LLMs, Generative AI and agentic system design
• Strong hands-on experience with n8n, building and implementing workflow automation solutions
• Experience taking AI solutions from design through to production deployment
• Experience designing reliable, scalable and maintainable technical solutions
• An understanding of monitoring, alerting and resilience within production environments
• The technical depth to guide other engineers and make sound engineering decisions
• Experience setting or implementing engineering standards and best practice
• Experience deploying AI/ML solutions using Azure, AWS or GCP
• Experience leading and developing engineers, including mentoring, technical guidance and managing priorities
• A good understanding of data management, security and compliance within AI delivery

Experience with RPA technologies such as Blue Prism would be useful, but isn't essential.

This is a great opportunity for an experienced AI Engineer who wants to combine hands-on engineering with technical team leadership. You'll inherit a team of three AI Engineers and play a key role in strengthening the technical foundations around both AI and n8n – improving how solutions are built, monitored, supported and scaled.

You might currently be a Lead AI Engineer, Senior AI Engineer, AI Technical Lead, AI Engineering Lead or an experienced AI/Automation Engineer already providing technical leadership to others.