Founding Operations & AI Automation Lead
Manchester city centre (hybrid)
£30,000–£45,000 DOE
Right now everything operational in the business runs through me and the leadership and a lot of it doesn't really "run" at all, it just gets done in the gaps. We're hiring the person who takes that off us and builds the entire operational and AI layer from scratch.
Growth is a specialist recruitment partner for companies building AI; frontier labs, the AI infrastructure layer, and the tooling behind AI products and agents. We work with some of the fastest-moving Seed–Series A vendors out of San Francisco, and we're now scaling the business behind that work.
This is our first dedicated ops hire. There's no process to inherit and no playbook to follow, you're the one who writes it. It's a build role through and through.
What you'll build and own
- Our CRM (Spott) as the single source of truth; set it up properly: pipelines, automation rules, reporting, and the data discipline that doesn't exist yet across the client and candidate lifecycle.
- AI workflows in Claude; research, call prep, briefs, proposals, post-call notes — wired into automations that kill the manual work.
- Automations across the stack (Make / Zapier / n8n, APIs); calendar, onboarding, document creation, comms.
- Reporting and dashboards that finally give us real operational data: time-to-placement, source effectiveness, capacity, pipeline health.
- The actual processes; how we run a search, hand off a role, onboard a client, move a candidate through. Right now it's in people's heads. Your job is to get it out, map it, and systemise it.
The operational reality you'll take on
- Be the person the business routes through day to day so the team can stay on clients and candidates instead of admin.
- Stand up the basics that don't formally exist yet finance admin (invoicing, chasing payments, receipts/expenses), and being the point of contact for our accountant and payroll.
- Own the tooling stack what we use, what we drop, renewals, contracts, and the suppliers behind them.
- Get our contracts and paperwork in order terms of business, candidate docs — and keep it tidy and consistent.
- Handle the practical stuff office, equipment, the bits that keep things ticking.
- Build the rails for the team onboarding new starters, writing the SOPs, and being the go-to for "how do we actually do this".
The point isn't to maintain any of the above most of it doesn't exist in any structured form today. The point is to build it once, automate what should be automated, and own it as it matures. As the systems get smarter, the manual work falls away and the role grows with it.
What you'll bring:
- Hands-on operations experience in a fast-moving business, ideally somewhere small or scaling where you didn't have a team underneath you, you just got things done. You've run the operational side of a company day to day, not just supported it.
- A track record of building processes from nothing. You've walked into mess or no structure at all, taken what was in people's heads, and turned it into systems other people can actually follow. SOPs, workflows, the rails the team runs on. Show us something you've stood up from scratch.
- A track record of building automations and AI workflows, not just using them. You can point to things you've shipped.
- Real, hands-on Claude / LLM fluency; prompt design, Claude Projects, and ideally API / MCP. You actually use this stuff, you don't just have opinions about it.
- Strong with automation tools (Make / Zapier / n8n) and comfortable light-coding (JS or Python, working with APIs); enough to wire systems together yourself without waiting on a developer.
- Proper CRM/ATS configuration experience, not just living in one, but setting it up: pipelines, fields, automation rules, reporting, and the data discipline that keeps it clean.
- Comfort with the unglamorous operational basics; finance admin, tooling and vendor management, contracts and paperwork, onboarding. You know what "good" looks like across the back office and you're happy owning it until it's automated.
- An operator's mindset; happy in the detail, owns outcomes end-to-end, thrives with autonomy, and comfortable building from a blank page with no one telling you how.
- Bonus: recruitment or B2B SaaS exposure.
Why this role: Genuine greenfield and I mean actually greenfield, not "we have a system you'll improve". There's nothing here yet. Direct line to me. You define the function, choose the tools, write the processes, and see your work used by the whole team every single day. If you're a builder who's sick of maintaining someone else's system this is the opposite of that.