Labour AI Specialist

About Sona

Running a frontline business is an operational puzzle most software has never touched. Shift-by-shift labour costs, compliance that changes by region and by role, and margins thin enough that a badly built rota can sink a quarter. It's a harder problem than most white-collar SaaS, and yet frontline sectors employ 80% of the global workforce and have received about 1% of the last decade's software investment.

We think that's because the problem needed AI, not just better software, before it was solvable. Frontline organisations sit on enormous amounts of operational data. Used properly, that data lets agents take on real parts of running the business rather than just reporting on it. That's what we're building at Sona, and it's early enough that the systems you build now will still be foundational in three years.

We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here.

About the Role

Sona's Labour AI team builds the forecasting, rules and scheduling tools that help hospitality and retail businesses get staffing right. Getting the tooling built is one problem. Getting it to actually work for a specific site, with its own trading patterns, staff and quirks, is another. That's what this role owns; working directly with customers to turn Sona's forecasting and scheduling tools into labour models that actually get used on site.

You'll derive labour rules from real trading data, spend time on site with customer teams to learn how the business actually runs, and build the trust with site managers that makes a new workload model stick. You'll present the impact and ROI of that work to customer executives and general managers, and act as the subject matter expert for labour optimisation in sales conversations.

You'll also be the person site managers trust enough to change how they staff, and the person customer executives and General Managers trust enough to back the changes you're proposing. That's an influence job as much as an analytical one. You'll report back to customer leadership on the impact, in numbers they can take to their own board.

There's no fixed playbook here. You'll adapt the same underlying labour model across different business types, from QSR to premium dining to retail.

Responsibilities

• Derive labour rules from real trading data using Sona's tooling and your own operational knowledge

• Spend time on site with customer teams, learning practical realities like stock deliveries and close-down procedures

• Build trust with site managers so workload models actually get followed

• Present impact and ROI to customer executives and general managers, winning buy-in for operational change

• Act as the labour optimisation subject matter expert in sales conversations

• Work across the full portfolio of live customer projects, picking up work as priorities shift between accounts

Requirements

• An operational background in hospitality, retail, or a similar hourly-workforce, fluctuating-demand business. You understand how the business runs day to day, not just how to analyse it from the outside

• Confident presenting to and winning buy-in from customer executives, general managers and boards, and comfortable holding your own with competing agendas in the room

• Comfortable with technology and confident picking up new tools quickly, including using AI tools in your own workflow

• Able to look into the data yourself and make decisions from what you find

• Comfortable operating without a fixed playbook

• Excited about using AI in your day-to-day work to 10x your output

• Bonus: a retail or workforce-management background where the underlying concepts transfer to hospitality

• Bonus: a commercial finance background with genuine credibility in front of operators

Benefits

• Salary: £85,000 - £100,000

• Hybrid working, 2+ days/week in our London office (Soho), with customer-facing travel

• Share options

• 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)

• Extra day of leave for every year of service

• Pension contributions matched up to 5%

• Comprehensive health insurance

• Enhanced parental leave & pay

• Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery)

• Annual all expenses paid team retreats

• The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office

• Professional development budget

• Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.