AI & ML jobs in Manchester

with Dr Vanessa Vallely OBE (Keynote speaker, )

A lunchtime keynote and panel on how AI and data are changing careers, skills and the shape of work, held during Women in Tech Week. Hosted by Nimble Approach with WeAreTechWomen. Dr Vanessa Vallely OBE gives the keynote at 12:30, followed at 12:50 by a panel that includes Amma Ainsley of Databricks. Arrival, lunch and networking from 12:00, a welcome from Nimble Approach at 12:20, and final networking from 13:40 until 14:00. Free, with lunch provided; send dietary requirements to the organiser in advance. Bring photographic ID: the venue requires it for entry. Why go: two hours, lunch included, and a keynote-plus-panel format that leaves real time to talk. Best for women in data and engineering roles thinking about where their skills go next, and for managers building teams around AI.

A two-day data and AI conference and exhibition at Manchester Central, built around implementation: how organisations are actually delivering data and AI projects at scale. Five theatres cover leadership and strategy; AI, analytics and intelligence; data governance, risk and compliance; architecture, platforms and infrastructure; and data engineering, integration and automation. Around 40 vendors and start-ups exhibit, and community meetups, including PyData Manchester and the Fabric & Power BI user group, take over theatres on the Tuesday evening. Tuesday 13 October runs 09:00 to 17:30, Wednesday 14 October 09:00 to 16:45. Visitor registration is free and covers the theatres, exhibition, meetups and the Tuesday afterparty at Junction, 17:30 to 20:30. Hands-on workshops are ticketed separately. Why go: around 3,000 data and AI practitioners under one roof for free, with an evening of community meetups attached. Best for data leaders, engineers and analysts who want to compare delivery notes with peers.

Two practitioner talks on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, held as the user group's evening session at the end of day one of Data Decoded MCR. Rob Sewell explains what fabric-toolbox is and why you should care, touring Microsoft's open-source Fabric tools: FUAM for tenant monitoring, FCA for cost analysis, DAX performance testing, semantic model auditing and the MicrosoftFabricMgmt PowerShell module. Duncan Boyne, a Power BI and Fabric consultant at Tugger, shows how AI can build a whole three-page report, from data model to Figma wireframe to finished pages, including where it goes wrong. 17:30 to 19:30 in the Data Governance, Risk & Compliance Theatre, then the conference afterparty. Free, but you need a free Data Decoded ticket as well as the Meetup RSVP. Why go: hands-on Fabric tooling and an honest look at AI-built reports in one sitting. Best for Power BI developers and data platform owners.

Lightning talks from PyData Manchester, the local chapter of the international PyData community, which welcomes all open-source data tooling, not only Python. Hosted by Bola A. and Yash Y. on the Data Engineering, Integration and Automation Theatre stage at Manchester Central, 17:30 to 19:30, at the end of day one of Data Decoded MCR. Community members give short talks, with or without slides; the line-up had not been announced at the time of writing. The group follows the NumFOCUS code of conduct. Free, but you need a free Data Decoded ticket, and capacity is 50. The conference afterparty at Junction follows, also booked through Data Decoded. Why go: short, unpolished talks from people doing the work, with the whole of Data Decoded's audience a corridor away. Best for data scientists and engineers who want to meet Manchester's open-source data crowd, or try a first talk.

Two sessions on building with AI on Microsoft's stack: one on Azure AI Foundry, one on making enterprise file data usable by agents without copying it. Shubhangi Goyal, Microsoft MVP and data and AI lead, covers building, customising and deploying AI applications in Foundry: prompt engineering, context management, evaluation and deployment, with an architecture walkthrough of a contextual copilot. Kirk Ryan, founder of KDBL and formerly a global principal technologist at NetApp, argues for a context lake over a data lake: zero-copy indexing across SMB, NFS, S3 and Microsoft 365, permissions enforced at query time, hybrid retrieval and MCP, plus a list of what didn't work. Doors at 18:00 at Morson Edge, Bonded Warehouse, 18 Lower Byrom Street; talks at 18:30 and 19:45, with food in between. Free. Why go: two technically dense talks, one of them candid about its failures. Best for Azure engineers and architects wiring AI into enterprise data.