AI & Automation Partner

Location: Manchester & Hybrid

Type: Full-Time (37.5 hours over 5 days per week)

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.

Pipeline & Platform Engineering: Build, maintain, and improve data pipelines and integrations across agency platforms such as Big Query, GCP, and Thought Spot.

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.

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.

Hands-On Engineering: Strong software engineering capabilities (e.g. Python, Type Script/Node.js) with experience building and maintaining production systems.

Cloud & Data

Experience:

Practical experience with cloud infrastructure (preferably GCP: Cloud Run, Big Query, 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, Lang Graph).

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.

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.