SaaS jobs in Manchester

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.

A free afternoon for women working in ecommerce, run as a fringe event to Mage Camp, the Magento and Adobe Commerce conference the following day. Three parts, from 14:00 to 17:30: a panel shaped by questions attendees submit in advance, anonymously if they like, on careers, confidence, leadership, mistakes and hard decisions; lightning talks of five to eight minutes from women with something to share; then roundtables of six to eight people on a single topic. Lightning-talk speakers are offered a free 30-minute session with a Hello Moxie mentor. At The Terrace, Dakota Hotel, 29 Ducie Street, M1 2JL. Free, booked separately from the main Mage Camp ticket. Why go: built for honest conversation rather than polished talks, and the roundtables mean you leave having actually spoken to people. Open to anyone in or around ecommerce, whatever the role or experience.

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.

A merchant-first conference for Magento and Adobe Commerce: a full day of practical talks on traffic, conversion, retention, average order value and operations, across two tracks, with the organisers promising substance over vendor pitches. Speakers include John Hughes, VP of Product at Hyvä, alongside Adam Hindle, Karlijn Löwik, Katie Gallagher OBE, Hilary Stephenson and David Edmundson-Bird. Co-organised by On Tap, PushOn, Gene, Foundation Commerce and Monsoon Consulting, with Hypernode and Stripe as headline sponsors. At Sister, Renold Building, 32a Altrincham Street, M1 7JR. Free for verified merchants; agencies, vendors and freelancers pay £75. Tickets include the recordings. The After Dark social follows from 18:00 at Salón Madre, free for ticket holders. Why go: unusually for ecommerce events, it is built around the people who run the stores. Best for in-house ecommerce leads and Magento developers.

A leadership-level ecommerce conference at Shoosmiths in the XYZ Building — retail media, marketplace strategy and the operational side of scaling online retail.