Senior Delivery Manager (i.AI)

Government must seize the opportunity of AI to drive outcomes in the public interest. This is of critical importance now. Government needs innovation and must not sleep on the opportunity presented by AI to drive better services for taxpayers and citizens.

i.AI (the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence) sits within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as part of the new digital centre of government. Our mission is to harness the opportunity of AI to improve lives, drive growth, and deliver better public services. We are an AI product team that focuses on delivery of technical solutions to public service challenges, responding to ministerial priorities and driving impact out into departments from the centre.

i.AI delivers high impact products and is mission-led, delivering value and innovation within government. We are able to move fast and build things, and are set up specifically to pivot quickly towards priority use cases, and re-use technologies for future impact.

You can see more about our work on ai.gov.uk and on LinkedIn. We work in the open and our code can be found at https://github.com/i-dot-ai

Our team is based across Bristol, Manchester and London, and we work in a hybrid manner as default. A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace, although requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance. We will consider part-time and flexible working arrangements we encourage you to discuss your needs with the hiring manager if you are offered the role.

i.AI is a small and dynamic team. DMs help the team achieve defined goals - whether thats a sprint target, a product milestone, or a wider programme objective - helping the people around them work together effectively to get there. You will need to work flexibly, designing processes around the needs of a given product team, and going beyond the strict DM remit to identify and solve wider project and team problems.

You will be working across one or more of i.AI's product teams, providing delivery leadership alongside Product Managers or technical team leads. Your work could range from a small group scoping a brand new idea, to a full multidisciplinary team delivering at scale. Products that our DMs work on include AI tutoring tools for schools, AI consultation analysis tools for government departments, or infrastructure platforms that power all of i.AI's products. Delivery also sits at a key overlap between project and internal processes, and as a Senior Delivery Manager you will also take ownership of key internal processes to improve our work across the incubator. This might include leading on how i.AI tracks and improves delivery across the incubator, or devising new systems to resolve systemic challenges.

Being flexible and passionate about getting things done are essential; this is a varied role and we need someone who's keen to adapt to what's needed.

The Senior DM role at i.AI spans the full range of product delivery from early scoping and stakeholder engagement, through procurement, assurance and risk management, to keeping multidisciplinary teams focused and unblocked as they build. As a Senior Delivery Manager, you will often be the most senior delivery voice on a product, and are expected to lead on the harder problems setting direction, managing upward, and building delivery capability in others. No two products are the same, and you will adapt your approach accordingly.

In practice, your work might involve:

• Scoping deliverables, defining goals, and mapping the path to impact for new AI products
• Orchestrating cross-disciplinary teams including engineers, user researchers, data scientists, and evaluators aligning on timelines and deliverables, breaking work into deliverable chunks, visualising work in progress, and actively reducing work required
• Working to proactively remove blockers to delivery, reconciling differences within the team and ensuring that stakeholder expectations are aligned
• Tailoring relevant agile methodologies to suit the needs of the team at different stages of product maturity, coaching and mentoring others in agile delivery, and driving team-wide adoption of the right practices for each context
• Owning risk and dependency management across products: identifying, tracking and resolving issues, actively addressing the most complex risks including where ownership sits outside the immediate team, and escalating to senior leadership where necessary
• Owning procurement paths and contractual management with external vendors, frontier AI labs, and government stakeholders
• Working with product leads on the engagement for products, for example designing and running the onboarding process, building productive relationships with teams from other government departments and beyond to enable delivery
• Supporting the effective performance of the team by promoting inclusion of diverse voices, regular, honest and constructive feedback, and continuous improvement
• Leading products through assurance processes, both internal and across other government departments
• Managing budgets and resources to ensure efficient use of funding
• Helping shape how i.AI tracks and improves its own delivery, including contributing to incubator-wide processes and tooling. Leading how i.AI tracks and improves its own delivery, owning incubator-wide processes and tooling and driving continuous improvement across teams.

• Energised by people problems you understand team dynamics, have an instinct for what makes groups work well together, and have experience coaching or developing others in delivery practices
• A proactive fixer you take ownership of problems, get creative about solving them, and don't wait to be asked
• Determined to make processes work whether that's a government assurance framework, a procurement route, or an internal way of working, you're the person who figures out how to make the system serve the goal, not the other way round
• Fluent across technical and non-technical worlds you can hold a conversation with an AI engineer and translate it for a minister's office
• Comfortable with ambiguity you can move fast in early-stage, loosely-defined work and know how to shift gear as a product matures
• An expert at identifying and managing risks, dependencies and blockers including actively addressing the most complex risks where ownership sits outside the immediate team, and knowing when to escalate and when to just fix it
• Deeply experienced in agile delivery and able to adapt methods to what the team actually needs, not just what the textbook says, and able to coach others in the right practices for the context
• Strong working knowledge of government assurance, procurement and budget processes, or similar processes in large organisations

Strong candidates come from many different backgrounds, and we encourage a broad range of applications to ensure we have a well-balanced team. Studies show that talented people, especially those from groups underrepresented in their field, are more likely to doubt themselves and feel like an 'imposter'. Unique perspectives enrich teams, so we urge you to have confidence in your potential contributions. If aspects of this role resonate with you, please apply.