Lead AI Automation Engineer

Department: Technology
Based in: Brighton HQ
Working arrangement: Full time, permanent, hybrid

About MPB.

MPB is the world's largest platform for used photo and video kit. We make buying, selling and trading cameras and lenses simple, sustainable and trustworthy, and we're still growing across the UK, US and Europe.

Help us build MPB’s AI Automation Hub

At MPB, teams across the business are already using AI to work smarter. Now we’re building a dedicated AI Automation Hub to turn that energy into production-grade, agentic automation that makes a real difference to how we work.

The Hub is a new, purpose-built team with its own mandate and backlog. Its job is to identify and deliver high-value internal AI use cases, and to act as a centre of excellence for emerging technology, working closely with colleagues across every function. Where we learn something new, we’ll share it widely.

Three roles, one team

The Hub is built around three lead roles that work in lockstep, each part of its own specialist function:

• Lead AI Product Manager: owns the backlog, prioritisation and lifecycle of Hub work, making sure we focus on the use cases that matter most

• Lead AI Automation Engineer: designs and ships agentic AI in production, covering LLM orchestration, agent frameworks and robust pipelines, aligned with MPB’s agentic reference architecture

• Lead Decision & AI Scientist: validates opportunities with data, builds and optimises agentic models and data products, and ensures AI capabilities are properly evaluated before they reach production

Together, you’ll take ideas from first concept to trusted, production-ready tools, with humans kept firmly in the loop.

This role.

This hub will be our centre of excellence for agentic AI. We're looking for a Lead AI Automation Engineer to be one of its founding technical pillars.

You'll move beyond tool admin and build real, production-ready AI systems: agents, retrieval pipelines and automations that make MPB work better every day. You'll prototype fast, prove what's possible with working demos rather than slide decks, and then ship it properly, in line with our agentic reference architecture.

You'll work as a peer with our AI Product Manager and our Lead Decision & AI Scientist, in a hub with no traditional leader and plenty of shared ownership. You'll help shape how we evaluate LLM outputs, choose the right models for the right job so budget meets value, and coach teams across MPB who are experimenting on their own. You'll also keep an eye on the frontier and tell us what's worth acting on.

What you'll bring.

• A strong software engineering background, with complex, distributed systems shipped to production

• Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration, agent frameworks and RAG, plus low-code automation tools such as n8n

• Confident coding in Python or Node.js, with a real builder's mindset

• Experience with cloud-native architecture (GCP or AWS), API management and robust backend pipelines

• A structured, pragmatic approach to debugging non-deterministic systems

• The ability to explain complex ideas to anyone by showing, not just telling

Nice to have.

• Experience defining evaluation frameworks for LLM outputs

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience)

• Experience coaching or influencing teams without formal authority

• A track record of turning emerging AI tooling into practical opportunities

Why MPB; Why now?

• Build from the ground up: you'll help define a brand-new function, with real ownership and real autonomy.

• Purpose you can feel: we're helping make photography kit more accessible and more sustainable. Good for people, good for the planet.

• Low-hierarchy, high-trust: the Hub is peer-led, and your ideas will be heard.

• Room to grow: a business scaling across three markets, with access to our Learning Lab and thousands of free courses.