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 robust and repeatable solutions for use by project teams.
• Working knowledge of addressing related challenges around data, intellectual-property, responsible-AI, contractual and commercial considerations, and ability to work with in partnership with relevant specialists.
• Experience coordinating multidisciplinary teams that include technical, analytical, engineering, domain, and business contributors.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to explain technical subjects plainly, facilitate decisions and constructively challenge assumptions.
• Line-management and mentoring experience, with a record of developing delivery professionals and building high-performing teams.
• A practical, collaborative, and outcomes-focused approach, with the willingness to roll up your sleeves and work directly on delivery problems.
• Willingness to challenge of best practices, ways of working and enablement; comfortable challenging business processes and supporting collaborative enablement.
• Risk focused: proactive, focus on risks for complex initiatives that have dependencies or high uncertainty.

Desirable:

• Experience developing business cases, governance models, delivery structures, cost and resource models, and deployment or operating blueprints.
• Experience with Microsoft’s AI and cloud ecosystem, for example Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Azure AI capabilities, Azure, SharePoint, DevOps, or GitHub.
• Experience with agent frameworks, and relevant software development languages.
• Knowledge of solution architecture and experience working with enterprise teams to implement secure, resilient, and supportable standards.
• Knowledge of Architectural, Engineering and Construction tool ecosystems, such as Autodesk Platform Services, Bentley iTwin or Esri.
• Experience in engineering, infrastructure, the built environment, or another asset-intensive sector.
• Demonstrable experience leading teams that build automations or AI agents, together with practical experience personally building, configuring, integrating, testing, and troubleshooting them.
• Evidence of evolving solutions to supportable and scalable products or services.
• A recognised project, programme, product or agile delivery qualification, or equivalent practical experience.

We are actively recruiting a diverse workforce that is reflective of the communities we serve. We recognise that differences in ability, skills and experience are a strength and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

UK Immigration

Mott MacDonald Ltd. are not currently offering sponsorship to candidates under the Skilled Worker visa route in the UK. This decision is as a consequence of the changes made to the Skilled Worker route by the UK Government in April 2024. We continue to welcome applications from candidates who are eligible for alternative immigration routes in the UK, that do not require sponsorship as a Skilled Worker now or in future.

Agile working  

At Mott MacDonald, we believe it makes business sense for you and your manager to choose how you can work most effectively to meet your client, team, and personal commitments. We offer a hybrid working policy that embraces your well-being, flexibility, and trust.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion 

We put equality, diversity, and inclusion at the heart of our business, seeking to promote fair employment procedures and practices to ensure equal opportunities for all. We encourage individual expression in our workplace and are committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels they can contribute.

AI Usage

At Mott MacDonald, we see the value AI can bring, but we take a people-first approach to hiring. While AI tools can help candidates prepare and build confidence, every application and hiring decision is reviewed by our recruitment and hiring teams. We encourage the responsible use of AI while ensuring we get to know the real person behind the application.

Accessibility

We want you to feel supported and able to perform at your best throughout our recruitment process. If there is anything we can do to make applying or interviewing with us more accessible, please contact us at reasonable.adjustments@mottmac.com and we'll be happy to discuss how we can help.

We offer some fantastic benefits including:

Financial wellbeing

• We match employee pension contributions between 4.5% and 7%.
• Life assurance equal up to 4 x your basic salary, with an option to increase the level of cover to 6 x your salary.
• Our income protection scheme provides a financial benefit, as well as absence and return to work support due to long-term illness or injury.
• Flexible benefits, including increased life assurance cover, critical illness insurance, payroll saving and will writing.
• As an independently owned business we share the financial success of the business with all our colleagues in various ways including annual bonus schemes.

Employee Ownership

• Our employee ownership model means no external investors, just us, creating a culture of shared success.
• Our employees have a stake and a voice in our business, giving them a direct connection to our success through our personal and group performance bonuses.
• As your career grows, so does your stake, recognising your long-term impact and contribution.
• Your voice matters, with the opportunity to connect directly with senior leadership through formal channels to help shape our future.
• For our senior roles you will have a direct pathway towards ownership from day one.

Health and wellbeing

• Private medical insurance for all UK colleagues.
• Health cash plan to support you with every day health costs and treatments.
• Access to Peppy, providing free support from menopause experts for all UK colleagues.
• A variety of wellbeing support is available through our comprehensive wellbeing program, including access for you and your family.
• Ability to flex your salary to opt into a wide range of health benefits, many of which can be extended to your family too.

Lifestyle

• A minimum of 33-35 days holiday each year, inclusive of public holidays and dependent on level, with the ability to buy or sell leave through our flexible benefits programme.
• 10 days additional paid leave for Armed Forces Reservists and Cadet Force Adult Volunteers.
• Holiday entitlement increased to a minimum of 35 days after 5 years’ service.
• Variety of employee saving schemes and discounts from high-street retailers.

 Enhanced family and carers leave

• Enhanced family leave policies, including 26 weeks paid maternity and adoption leave, and two weeks paid paternity/partner leave.
• Our shared parental leave matches maternity leave meaning we pay up to 24 weeks at full pay.
• Up to five additional days leave are provided for those with significant caring responsibilities, two of which are paid.
• We offer policies and dedicated support to help military families balance service life with career and wellbeing.

Learning and development

• Primary annual professional institution subscription.
• A broad range of opportunities to enhance both technical and soft skills through mentoring, formal training, and self-development options.

Networks, communities, and social outcomes

• Join a wide range of groups including our Advanced Employee Networks which support our LGBTQ+, gender, race and ethnicity, disability, and parents/carers communities.
• We are proud signatories of the Armed Forces Covenant and Gold Award holders in the MOD Employer Recognition Scheme, supported by our dedicated internal Armed Forces Network. 

  If you're a service leaver, veteran, reservist or member of a military family, you can connect with our people through Armed Forces Careers - Connectr to ask questions, gain career insights and learn more about opportunities at Mott MacDonald.

• Make a difference within our communities through our social outcomes.

Apply now, or for more information about our application process, click here.