Head of AI & Automation at The Local… · Sydney

4 days per week onsite in Alexandria, NSW

About The Local Project

The Local Project is one of the fastest-growing premium architecture and design media businesses, operating across Australia, New Zealand and North America. We celebrate extraordinary local design and its global impact through editorial, digital, video and documentary content, reaching over 100 million impressions per month. In 2024 we expanded with The Local Production, a full-service creative agency dedicated to elevating brands through strategic storytelling and high-end content creation.

We are recognised by the industry for our craft. In 2025 we were awarded Publication of the Year, Publishing Company of the Year, Publish Leader of the Year, and Special Edition of the Year at the Mumbrella Publish Awards.

The Role

Every hour our editors, producers, designers and partnerships team spend on admin, process and repetition is an hour taken from the work only they can do. We believe the next era of TLP is one where the craft gets more human and everything around it gets dramatically smarter. Where our people spend their time on judgement, taste and relationships, and the machinery underneath moves as beautifully as the work it carries.

We have spent the past year designing that future in detail, from mapping the entire business to identify the opportunities for efficiency all the way through to selecting our preferred stack and writing the relevant governance. What we need now is the person who builds it.

That is this role. It is the first of its kind at TLP, it reports directly to the Founder and CEO, and it will define how one of the world's leading design media businesses operates for the next decade.

Core responsibilities include:

You will own AI and automation across the whole business, in your first year alone you will:

- Stand up Claude Enterprise across the business. Configure and deploy our company wide rollout from scratch: SSO, permissions, data governance, connector stack, onboarding. Claude is our agent layer, and you will build TLP's capability on it, deep rather than broad.

- Build and embed AI playbooks for every department. Editorial, production, partnerships, digital, marketing and events, leadership, operations, finance and HR. Each has a different tolerance for automation, and each playbook has to respect the difference. You will design the workflows, build the Skills, train the teams and make it stick.

- Build our partnerships and sales lifecycle system. A multi-component system spanning pre-pipeline intelligence, inbound automation, proposal generation, client delivery and renewal. This is the most ambitious build in the plan and the one with direct revenue attached. Our ambition is the best partnerships function in media, and this system is how we get there.

Beyond year one, the role is permanent and grows with what you build: you will own TLP's automation layer, Skills library, tooling decisions, vendor spend and capability development as a standing function of the business.

Reporting line structure:

• You report directly to the Founder and CEO and work day to day with every department head.

• This is an individual contributor role by design. You are a builder, and the economics of the role depend on it staying that way. You will have dedicated coordination support from the CEO's office for your first six months, the department heads as your delivery arm, and a contractor budget for bounded technical builds you choose to buy rather than make.

Who we are looking for

We care far more about what you have actually built and rolled out than about credentials.

• Hands-on with AI, and deep in Claude specifically. You have built with Projects, Skills, connectors and MCP, and you can wire Claude into real business systems through tools like Zapier. If your fluency is prompts and enthusiasm rather than working systems, this is not the role.

• You have led at least one company-wide rollout that changed how people actually work, whether that was AI, a CRM, a production system or a workflow platform, and you can talk honestly about what broke and what you would do differently.

• You likely come from a project/programme/transformation management background and have transitioned into AI as a specialism, although we are open minded on your exact career trajectory.

• You can sit with stakeholders who have varying levels of comfort and experience with AI and bring them on the journey.

• You can hold a conversation about commercial pipeline, margin and cost per output, and you measure your own work in those terms.

In your application summary please include a short note on the most meaningful thing you have built or rolled out with AI to date, and what it changed.