AI & Automation Lead

Role Overview

As the AI and Automation Lead you will play a major role in shaping our automation and AI delivery capability, standards, and technical strategy. You will lead a team of automation and AI specialists, provide hands‑on coaching, and deliver technical assurance across multiple client engagements to ensure high-quality, secure, and scalable automation solutions and AI-enabled products. You will also be instrumental in helping to build and secure future work for our teams; preparing statements of work and engaging with clients alongside our sales team. This role provides the perfect blend of leadership, technical depth, innovation, and client interaction, offering substantial scope to make a lasting impact on both our clients and the direction of our digital transformation service offerings.

Requirements

Strong people skills; able to engage clients around understanding their problems and solution-forming, as well as being able to inspire and motivate your teams. Experience working with stakeholders to propose appropriate automation and AI solutions across a broad range of technical and operational challenges. Deep expertise in Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Automate (cloud flows, approvals, desktop flows/RPA), Power Apps, Dataverse, and environment/security administration. Strong hands‑on experience designing and delivering end-to-end automation solutions (process discovery through build, release, monitoring, and continuous improvement). Experience with Copilot Studio, including building copilots, connecting to enterprise data and APIs, using orchestration, and managing topics/actions securely. Strong understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations, prompt design, evaluation, and common patterns for enterprise use cases (including retrieval-augmented generation). Experience with Azure AI Foundry concepts and tooling, including AI application development workflows, model selection/evaluation, safety controls, and enterprise integration. Experience designing and implementing agentic solutions (e.g., task-oriented agents, data agents) and integrating them with business processes and automation. Ability to design secure integrations using APIs/connectors across Microsoft 365, Azure services, line-of-business systems, and data platforms. Strong understanding of governance across automation and AI, including environment strategy, DLP policies, access controls, auditability, and change management. Ability to embed governance frameworks across delivery teams using repeatable standards, templates, and automated controls. Experience designing secure and compliant solutions aligned to enterprise standards and regulatory requirements, including responsible AI considerations. Working knowledge of data and analytics concepts (data modelling fundamentals, semantic layers, and data quality) to enable automation and AI use cases. Expertise in CI/CD and ALM practices for Power Platform and AI solutions (source control, pipelines, code reviews, testing, and release management). Ability to lead technical assurance across architectures, integrations, automation workflows, and AI solution components. Hands‑on expertise implementing integrations and orchestration patterns, including event-driven approaches and human-in-the-loop workflows where appropriate. Experience with predictive analytics and/or applied machine learning, including framing use cases, collaborating on feature/data needs, and deploying models into workflows. Understanding of how AI Foundry and Copilot Studio solutions can extend the automation ecosystem through copilots, agents, and custom workflows. Strong capability in monitoring, observability, and operational support for production automations and AI systems (telemetry, incident response, and performance). Experience with performance tuning and cost optimisation across automation, integrations, and AI services. Ability to evaluate new technologies, patterns, and tools across Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Azure AI, and the data platform ecosystem to guide technical strategy.

Tech Stack

• Azure
• Cloud
• RPA

Benefits

At Sword, our core values and culture are based on caring about our people, investing in training and career development, and building inclusive teams where we are all encouraged to contribute to achieve success. We offer comprehensive benefits designed to support your professional development and enhance your overall quality of life. In addition to a Competitive Salary, here's what you can expect as part of our benefits package:

• Personalised Career Development: We create a development plan customised to your goals and aspirations, with a range of learning and development opportunities within a culture that encourages growth.
• Flexible working: Flexible work arrangements to support your work-life balance. We can’t promise to always be able to meet every request, however, are keen to discuss your individual preferences to make it work where we can.
• A Fantastic Benefits Package: This includes generous annual leave allowance, enhanced family friendly benefits, pension scheme, access to private health, well-being, and insurance schemes.