Our company has moved past experimenting with AI. An internally built, agentic system already runs our planning cycle end-to-end—from customer sales order through to purchase orders and production planning—handling hundreds of orders daily in live production. The Lead AI Engineer is the first dedicated hire into this capability and will become its technical owner.

This role has two parallel mandates. The first is to instill proper engineering discipline around the systems already in production to ensure they are documented, tested, monitored, recoverable, and not dependent on any single individual. The second is to architect and build the next wave of automation across the Group.

This is a hands-on role. Conventional IT, infrastructure, and end-user support are covered elsewhere and do not form part of this position. You will work directly with the Supply Chain and IT Executive and cross-functionally with planning, procurement, production, and finance teams. Success is measured by systems that work in the real business, not by demonstrations.

Technical Ownership & Core Engineering

• Assume technical ownership of the Group's existing production AI systems (including the agentic planning and MRP system) and bring them under source control with documented architecture, managed environments, and a defined deployment path.

• Eliminate single points of failure across all production automation to ensure no business-critical system relies on the knowledge of a single individual.

• Architect new systems with clear boundaries, data contracts, defined failure modes, and designs that will still hold when the system is three times larger.

Quality Assurance & Evaluation

• Build and maintain evaluation harnesses for every automated process, using libraries of real historical cases with known good outcomes, and run them against every code change, prompt change, and model version upgrade before release.

• Establish and enforce a rigorous release path from development to production, including shadow mode, pilot phases with defined success criteria, canary releases by product line, and staged expansion of autonomy based on evidence.

• Instrument all automated processes for observability, including full logging, anomaly alerting, and a queryable audit trail.

Safety, Governance & Control

• Design bounded autonomy into every agent, with hard limits on value, quantity, supplier, and scope that the system cannot exceed, triggering a loud failure rather than acting silently outside those bounds.

• Implement human approval gates for irreversible and financially committing actions, only removing them where evaluation history and executive agreement justify it.

• Maintain tested rollback and kill-switch capabilities, along with a documented manual fallback process for every automated business process.

• Ensure all automated processes that create financial commitments meet the Group's control requirements (segregation of duties, approval limits, audit trail) in collaboration with the CFO and external audit.

Strategy & Business Integration

• Identify, scope, prioritise, and build the next wave of automation across planning, procurement, production, logistics, finance, and commercial functions.

• Spend time on the floor and in the business to learn how processes actually work before automating them, rather than automating the process as described.

• Run pilots with pre-agreed success criteria, measurement periods, and decision points, recommending whether to proceed, extend, or stop based on evidence.

• Produce the documentation, runbooks, and user training that allow business users to understand, supervise, and challenge the systems they rely on.

Reporting & Vendor Management

• Own model, vendor, and tooling selection, including cost per transaction, data handling, residency, and exposure to lock-in.

• Report delivery progress, risks, incidents, and accumulated technical debt to the Supply Chain and IT Executive, and present to the executive team as required.

Essential Experience

• Production Release Discipline: Has personally owned software running in production where failure carried commercial consequence and can detail how they staged rollouts, tested before release, detected problems, rolled back, and handled incidents.

• End-to-End Systems: Demonstrable evidence of designing and delivering complete working systems, not components or PoCs, including the unglamorous parts: error handling, data quality, monitoring, documentation, and handover.

• Experience: Minimum of 8 years in software engineering or systems development, with at least 3 years in a senior, lead, or principal capacity.

Technical Skills

• Fluent with AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent.

• Practical experience building with Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic systems (context and prompt design, tool use, evaluation methods, handling non-determinism) is a strong advantage. Strong engineering fundamentals with limited agent experience will be considered; the reverse will not.

Business & Personal Attributes

• Genuine curiosity about the business itself. Willingness to learn the specifics of corrugated packaging, manufacturing, and supply chain to design systems that reflect how the business actually works.

• Comfortable operating as a first hire with wide scope, limited structure, and direct executive exposure.

• Formal qualifications are secondary to a demonstrable track record. A machine learning research/model training background is not a substitute for engineering and release experience.

Advantageous (but not essential)

• Exposure to ERP, MRP, or manufacturing planning environments.

Leadership Principles

• Customer Obsession: Relentlessly pursue customer trust, deliver on commitments, and focus on long-term partnerships.

• Ubuntu: Lead with empathy and accountability, recognising that team performance reflects leadership quality.

• Bias for Action: Act decisively, execute quickly, and adapt to changing conditions with agility.

• Sensibility: Innovate efficiently, prioritising sustainable growth without unnecessary cost or waste.

• Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit: Constructively challenge decisions, collaborate for optimal outcomes, and fully commit to agreed strategies.

• Determination: Demonstrate resilience, passion, and commitment in building systems the business can rely on.