AI & Automation Partner

AI & Automation Partner Location: Manchester & Hybrid Type: Full-Time (37.5 hours over 5 days per week) The Opportunity Are you a hands-on engineer who thrives on building, maintaining, and shipping production-grade tech? Open Partners is looking for an AI & Automation Partner to join our AI & Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE). Reporting to our AI & Automation Senior Partner, you will add crucial engineering capacity to the team by building the technical pipelines, platforms, and tools that power our data and AI products. This is a technical, delivery-focused role working alongside our Data Planning Senior Partner to turn client requirements into robust, high-performing software. Your Role & Responsibilities Pipeline & Platform Engineering: Build, maintain, and improve data pipelines and integrations across agency platforms such as BigQuery, GCP, and ThoughtSpot. Technical Delivery: Support the rollout of AI and automation-powered tools across data, media, and reporting workflows to standards set by CoE leadership. Clean & Production-Grade Code: Write clean, well-documented code while maintaining and scaling existing CoE tools and pipelines. Commercial AI Integration: Support the integration of commercial AI platforms and APIs, including OpenAI and Google Gemini/Vertex AI, into agency tooling. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with the Data Planning Senior Partner to translate client-facing needs into technical builds. Security & Governance: Adhere strictly to agency standards for security, data handling, GDPR, and governance, registering builds through the App Passport process. Knowledge Sharing: Contribute to the CoE knowledge base and support agency-wide AI and automation upskilling. What Success Looks Like Roadmap Delivery: Consistently shipping build tasks against the quarterly CoE roadmap. Unblocking Capacity: Effectively reducing delivery bottlenecks and increasing total CoE output. Governance Compliance: Maintaining high percentages of documented, governance-compliant, and App Passport-registered builds. System Reliability: Ensuring high uptime and performance across all pipelines and tools you maintain. Stakeholder Satisfaction: Positive feedback from delivery leads on technical responsiveness and execution quality. What You’ll Bring Hands-On Engineering: Strong software engineering capabilities (e.g. Python, TypeScript/Node.js) with experience building and maintaining production systems. Cloud & Data Experience: Practical experience with cloud infrastructure (preferably GCP: Cloud Run, BigQuery, Secret Manager) and building API-driven data pipelines. Automation & AI Capabilities: Working knowledge of workflow automation tools like n8n, along with exposure to commercial AI platforms, APIs, or LLM applications (e.g. RAG, LangGraph). Data Governance Discipline: Solid understanding of security, data handling, and GDPR principles in an engineering setting. Communication & Mindset: Clear communication skills, an ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical partners, and a drive to build deep AI expertise. Our Values & Mindset At Open Partners, we hire mindset first. It is the single biggest factor of success in our business, and we believe you can grow that mindset in any walk of life and career background. If you do not have direct industry experience but possess a fierce growth mindset and transferable engineering skills, we want to hear from you. We hold ourselves to three simple standards: Smarter: Aim high, train hard, embrace next. Faster: Learn fast, adapt fast, act fast. Better: Think, say, and do what is best. Ready to elevate your career? Apply today! Locations Manchester Remote status Hybrid About Open Partners Open Partners was founded in 2017 to be The Agency of Next . Designed to be constantly focussed on the future, we think ahead for our clients, quickly pivoting them to new areas of opportunity as they arise. Delivering marketing transformations for over 50 clients, Open Partners’ integrated Media, Data and Creative capabilities drive more accountable and effective returns for international performance advertisers. We strive to always be smarter, faster, and better - all the while upholding the very highest standards of commercial and operational integrity.