AI Implementation Delivery Lead

Location/s: UK-wide
Recruiter contact: Steven Johnston

Mott MacDonald is a global engineering, management, and development consultancy with over 20,000 employees across more than 50 countries and 140+ offices. 

We work across incredible global industries, delivering exciting work that is defining our future and making an important societal impact in the communities we serve. Our people power our performance – we succeed when they do. With countless opportunities to collaborate, learn, and grow, the possibilities for excellence are as varied as every individual. 

Whether you want to grow as a subject matter expert or broaden your experience with roles across our international community, you’re surrounded by global specialists who want to combine their expertise and champion you to be your best. As a proudly employee-owned business, we benefit our clients, our communities, and each other, investing in creating the right space for everyone to feel empowered, included, and valued. Whatever your ambition, Mott MacDonald is where people come to be brilliant.

About the business unit

Mott MacDonald’s support services are the driving force behind our organisation, enabling us to run efficiently and effectively. The team works collaboratively to offer specialist advice, best practice, and technology to all areas of our business, specifically designed for our global reach.

Overview of the role

We are looking for anAI Implementation Delivery Lead to join our Digital Value Implementation team in our Central Digital function.

This is a hands-on leadership role for an experienced engineer or project manager who combines disciplined delivery management, strong technical understanding and practical experience of delivery new engineering capabilities. You will lead multidisciplinary team that creates automations, AI agents, and wider AI-enabled tools for our Major Projects.

You will lead and direct implementation of high-value automations, AI solutions, and digital innovations for our prioritised support to Major Projects. These will run from concept and business case through design, build and assurance, to deployment across multiple projects. You will ensure readiness for scaling, adoption planning, and support. A central part of the role is identifying and prioritising the highest value potential opportunities, turning these in to pilots to realise value on select projects and evolve them into robust, repeatable, and scale-ready tools that deliver measurable value.

You will be expected to move between governance forums, delivery plans and stakeholder decisions and practical work such as prototyping agents, shaping workflows, connecting data and tools, reviewing technical designs, testing behaviour, and resolving delivery blockers.

Key responsibilities and duties include:

End-to-end delivery leadership

• Shape the opportunity. Work with business users and domain specialists to define the problem, intended outcomes, scope, success measures, constraints, and route to value.
• Lead from concept to scale. Own complex digital and innovation projects and programmes through discovery, business case, design, build, test, deployment, adoption, benefits realisation, and readiness for transition into sustainable operations.
• Plan and control delivery. Establish integrated delivery plans, milestones, budgets, resource profiles, dependencies, and critical paths; manage risks, assumptions, issues, decisions, and change control. Understand when to prioritise, escalate and have a strong focus on risks as well as unblocking challenges.
• Coordinate multidisciplinary teams. Bring together project technical delivery, data science, software development, engineering, design, domain, and operational expertise, ensuring that responsibilities and interfaces are understood.
• Assure adoption and service readiness. Plan testing, user acceptance, training, communications, deployment, operational support, monitoring, and handover so that solutions are adopted, and sustained on the projects to meet their objectives.

AI agents and technical delivery

• Deliver applied AI and automation. Lead initiatives involving team members across advanced analytics, machine learning, computer vision, and intelligent automation, translating technical possibilities into practical, safe, and valuable solutions.
• Build agents. Guide the team through prototyping, configuration, coding, integration, testing and debugging of Copilot AI agents. Undertake assurance and governance activities to ensure the solutions meet the project needs and our development principles and requirements.
• Select the right implementation path. Develop your understanding of our existing toolkit and the strengths, limitations, and trade-offs of different delivery options. Weigh and decide an approach based on speed, control, integration complexity, security, scale, maintainability, cost, and supportability.
• Design for responsible use. Ensure embedding of data protection, information security, responsible AI, human oversight, traceability, evaluation, and proportionate controls throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Scaling, governance, and commercial value

• Enable reuse. Consider and navigate contractual, commercial, and intellectual-property considerations with the relevant specialists so that solutions, components, and learning can be reused across projects.
• Ready pilots for scale. Move prototypes beyond proof of concept by establishing repeatable delivery patterns aligned to our scaling mechanisms, coordinate early-stage product management duties, ready the products for scale by our enterprise teams; this includes identifying reusable components, documentation and deployment playbooks.

Stakeholder and people leadership

• Translate between audiences. Explain complex technical choices in clear business and non-technical language; and convert user and business needs into actionable technical and delivery requirements.
• Lead and develop people. Line manage and mentor the AI Implementation Delivery team members, setting clear objectives, giving constructive feedback, supporting career development, and building delivery capability. Work similarly with wider resource groups and internal networks.
• Create an effective team culture. Coach team members, remove blockers and foster ownership, inclusion, learning, quality, and pragmatic decision-making.

Candidate specification

Essential:

• Proven experience leading digital or innovation projects and programmes, including successful transition from concept or pilot to adoption and readiness for scaling.
• Strong hands-on project experience delivering technical design or project management.
• Experience developing and implementing digital solutions centred on or enabled by automation and Copilot AI agents, together with practical experience personally building, configuring, integrating, testing, and troubleshooting AI agents.
• Working knowledge of common platforms for automation and AI Agent delivery, with the judgement to select and combine them appropriately.
• Technical fluency across core automation, Co-pilot AI, Agent, data and software delivery concepts, including and implementation and adoption challenges.
• Understanding of applied AI and automation capabilities and the controls needed to use them responsibly.
• Evidence of turning prototypes into robu