Marketing AI Operations Engineer

Marketing moves fast. The brands that win are the ones that have worked out how to do more without simply adding more people. That is the problem this role exists to solve, and it is a genuinely interesting one.

As our Marketing AI Operations Engineer at Protein Works, you will be the person who looks at how campaigns are planned, produced, tested, and improved, and then systematically works out which parts of that process can be handed off to automation. Not for the sake of novelty, and not to build something impressive that nobody uses. For leverage: making the whole marketing function faster, more consistent, and more commercially effective by building real systems that the team actually relies on.

This is a new role inside a growing team, which means you will be building from scratch rather than inheriting someone else's half-finished setup. You will work across paid media, email, content, and creative production, connect our tools and data into coherent workflows, and take ownership of the full journey from scoping a problem through to measuring the impact of the solution you built. If you are the kind of person who gets energy from building things, proving they work, and then moving on to the next problem, this is a role worth reading on about.

About Protein Works

Founded in 2012 on a clear conviction: the sports nutrition industry had become complacent, and there was a better way to do it. Over a decade later, we are a £50m business with five consecutive years of double-digit growth, a brand new £10m campus in Liverpool, and ambitions that go well beyond where we are today.

We are a brand, a retailer, a manufacturer and a fulfilment operation. All in-house, all under one roof. That breadth is deliberate. It gives our people exposure and influence that most businesses simply cannot offer, and it gives us a platform to scale in a way that few companies in this space can match.

We are growing, investing and hiring with purpose. If you want to join a business with the energy of a challenger and the foundations of a market leader, this is the right moment to do it.

What you will be doing

• Mapping day-to-day marketing tasks and identifying which are repeatable, structured, and suitable for automation
• Designing and building AI-powered workflows across paid media, content, email, and creative production using tools such as n8n, Make, or Zapier
• Engineering and maintaining prompts across ad copy, email sequences, product content, and UGC frameworks, holding a high quality bar throughout
• Connecting AI tooling into the existing marketing tech stack so data and outputs flow cleanly between platforms
• Building feedback loop infrastructure that captures how AI outputs perform in the real world and feeds those signals back in to drive continuous improvement
• Establishing and maintaining guardrails for AI-generated content, including regular output audits, documented compliance controls, and clear escalation paths
• Creating documentation, running team walkthroughs, and supporting go-lives so that what you build actually gets adopted and used
• Tracking the metrics that matter: time saved, creative output velocity, error reduction, and adoption rates
• Staying current on new AI and automation capabilities, prototyping sensibly, and sharing what is genuinely useful rather than just what is new

What success looks like

• Proven experience building and operationalising automation workflows end-to-end, not just using tools but systematising them in a way that outlasts your involvement
• Hands-on prompt engineering experience across LLMs such as GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini, with production-grade outputs you can point to
• Practical experience with n8n, Make, or Zapier connected to real marketing or ecommerce workflows
• Experience designing feedback mechanisms that close the loop between AI output and real-world performance
• A working understanding of bias risk in AI-generated content and how to build controls that catch problems before they go live, including awareness of GDPR and UK advertising standards
• Comfortable working across the full marketing funnel: paid, email, content, and creative
• Able to take a messy brief and turn it into a structured, working solution without needing it handed to you step by step
• A high personal written communication standard, because you will be QA-ing AI outputs and your bar needs to be above what you are checking
• A degree is not required for this role. What matters is what you have built, what you can show, and how you think about problems.

You are the kind of person who designs for systems doing the work, not for you doing the work. You ask whether something can run without you before you build it. You are commercially grounded enough to connect every workflow back to speed, cost, or revenue, and you are honest enough to kill a project that is not delivering rather than defend it. You are energised by pace, not exhausted by it, and you are comfortable in an environment where the team is figuring things out together. Twelve months from now, success looks like this: marketing campaigns are moving faster, the team is using what you built as a normal part of how they work, and you are already halfway through the next problem.

What you will get

• Exclusive staff discounts
• Private healthcare
• Birthday day off
• Pension scheme
• Unique bonus scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Access to retail discounts
• Staff socials and events
• State of the art PW Campus
• WFH on Fridays
• Refreshments on-site